Medical News
Health
24 June 2019
Do gut microbes influence brain development?iStock/Getty
By Adam VaughanThe microbes in our guts might play a role in how the human brain develops in our earliest years. The finding is just the latest evidence of how important gut microbes are: they have previously been linked to variation in human body weight, to mental health and even to how individuals react to drugs.
Sophie Rowland at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and her colleagues analysed the microbial DNA in stools from 250 children and paired the information with data on brain activity obtained using fMRI brain scans.
For children under two years old, the results show “a significant association between higher abundances of these two Bifidobacterium species and [brain] network connectivity,” says Rowland. The bug B. longum was linked to better activity in parts of the brain associated with attention. For the other microbe, B. pseudocatenulatum, the link was with better development in the area of the brain involved in language acquisition.
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But Rowland stresses that it’s not possible to say yet that we can alter our children’s gut microbiomes to help their brain development. “There could be a hypothesis that more B. longum might help language and attention development within the brain. Whether that’s as simple as giving a kid a B. longum probiotic I can’t say,” she says. The amount of B. longum in a child’s gut has previously been linked with breastfeeding.
The next steps for Rowland’s research, which was presented at the ASM Microbe conference in San Francisco on 21 June, is to follow the children for up to seven years. That should show how the early development of our gut microbiome could affect brain development later on.
More on these topics:
bacteria
brain