Her parents were running out of hope. Their teenage daughter, Mary, had been diagnosed with a severe case of obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), as well as ADHD. They had dragged her to clinics around the country in an effort to thwart the scary, intrusive thoughts and the repetitive behaviors that Mary felt compelled to perform. Even a litany of psychotropic medications didn’t make much difference. It seemed like nothing could stop the relentless nature of Mary’s disorder.
Their last hope for Mary was Boston-area psychiatrist James Greenblatt. Arriving at his office in Waltham, MA, her parents had only one request: help us help Mary.
Greenblatt started by posing the usual questions about Mary’s background, her childhood, and the onset of her illness. But then he asked a question that no psychiatrist ever had: How was Mary’s gut? Did she suffer digestive upset? Constipation or diarrhea? Acid reflux? Had Mary’s digestion seemed to change at all before or during her illness? Her parents looked at each other. The answer to many of the doctor’s questions was, indeed, “Yes.”
That’s what prompted Greenblatt to take a surprising approach: besides psychotherapy and medication, Greenblatt also prescribed Mary a twice-daily dose of probiotics, the array of helpful bacteria that lives in our gut. The change in Mary was nothing short of miraculous: within six months, her symptoms had greatly diminished. One year after the probiotic prescription, there was no sign that Mary had ever been ill.
Her parents may have been stunned, but to Greenblatt, Mary’s case was an obvious one. An imbalance in the microbes in Mary’s gut was either contributing to, or causing, her mental symptoms. “The gut is really your second brain,” Greenblatt said. “There are more neurons in the GI tract than anywhere else except the brain.”
Greenblatt’s provocative idea — that psychiatric woes can be solved by targeting the digestive system — is increasingly reinforced by cutting-edge science. For decades, researchers have known of the connection between the brain and the gut. Anxiety often causes nausea and diarrhea, and depression can change appetite. The connection may have been established, but scientists thought communication was one way: it traveled from the brain to the gut, and not the other way around.
But now, a new understanding of the trillions of microbes living in our guts reveals that this communication process is more like a multi-lane superhighway than a one-way street. By showing that changing bacteria in the gut can change behavior, this new research might one day transform the way we understand — and treat — a variety of mental health disorders.
FOR DECADES, RESEARCHERS HAVE KNOWN OF THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THE BRAIN AND THE GUT
For Greenblatt, this radical treatment protocol has actually been decades in the making. Even during his psychiatric residency at George Washington University, he was perplexed by the way mental disorders were treated. It was as if, he said, the brain was totally separate from the body. More than 20 years of work treating eating disorders emphasized Greenblatt’s hunch: that the connection between body and mind was more important than conventional psychiatry assumed. “Each year, I get more and more impressed at how important the GI tract is for healthy mood and the controlling of behavior,” Greenblatt said. Among eating disorder patients, Greenblatt found that more than half of psychiatric complaints were associated with problems in the gut — and in some patients, he says he has remedied both using solely high-dose probiotics, along with normalizing eating.
Greenblatt’s solution might strike us as simple, but he’s actually targeting a vast, complex, and mysterious realm of the human body: around 90 percent of our cells are actually bacterial, and bacterial genes outnumber human genes by a factor of 99 to 1. But those bacteria, most of which perform helpful functions, weren’t always with us: a baby is essentially sterile until it enters the birth canal, at which point the bacteria start to arrive — and they don’t stop. From a mother’s vaginal microbes to hugs and kisses from relatives, the exposures of newborns and toddlers in their earliest years is critical to the development of a robust microbiome.
GREENBLATT'S ACTUALLY TARGETING A VAST, COMPLEX, AND MYSTERIOUS REALM OF THE HUMAN BODY
In fact, recent research suggests that early microbiome development might play a key role in at least some aspects of one’s adult mental health. One 2011 study out of McMaster University compared the behaviors of normal eight-week-old mice and mice whose guts were stripped of microbes. Bacteria-free mice exhibited higher levels of risk-taking, and neurochemical analysis revealed higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol and altered levels of the brain chemical BDNF, which has been implicated in human anxiety and depression. “This work showed us that anxiety was normal, and that the gut-brain axis was involved in that,” Jane Foster, the study’s lead author, said. “Everybody knew that stress and anxiety could lead to gastrointestinal symptoms, but we looked at it from the bottom up and showed that the gut could communicate with the brain. It was the first demonstration that the gut itself could influence brain development.”
Subsequent research out of McMaster further enforces those findings, by showing that swapping one mouse’s gut bacteria with that of another can significantly alter behavior. Researchers transplanted microbes from one group of mice, which were characterized by timidity, into the guts of mice who tended to take more risks. What they observed was a complete personality shift: timid mice became outgoing, while outgoing mice became timid. “It’s good evidence that the microbiota houses these behaviors,” Foster said.
While researchers have established a compelling link between gut bacteria and mental health, they’re still trying to figure out the extent to which the human microbiome — once it’s populated in early childhood — can be transformed. “The brain seems to be hardwired for anxiety by puberty and early adolescence,” Foster said. If the microbiome is part of that hardwiring, then it would suggest that once we pass a certain threshold, the impact of bacterial tweaks on problems like depression and anxiety might wane.
In one Japanese study, for instance, researchers were only able to change the baseline stress characteristics of germ-free mice until nine weeks of age. After that, no variety of bacterial additions to the mice’s guts could properly regulate stress and anxiety levels. The explanation for this phenomenon might lie in what’s known as “developmental programming” — the idea that various environmental factors, to which we’re exposed early on, greatly determine the structure and function of organs including the gut and the brain.
“There are changes that happen early in life that we can’t reverse,” said John Cryan, a neuroscientist at the University of Cork in Ireland and a main investigator at the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre. “But there are some changes that we can reverse. It tells us that there is a window when microbes are having their main effects and, until this closes, many changes can be reversed.”
Even if our gut bacteria carries the biggest influence when we’re young, experts like Greenblatt and Cryan are still convinced that tweaking these bacteria later in life can yield profound behavioral and psychological changes. In a study led by Cryan, anxious mice dosed with the probiotic bacterium Lactobacillus rhamnosus (JB-1) showed lower levels of anxiety, decreased stress hormones, and even an increase in brain receptors for a neurotransmitter that’s vital in curbing worry, anxiety, and fear.
John Bienenstock, a co-author on that study, compared the probiotics’ effects to benzodiazepines like Valium and Xanax. “The similarity is intriguing. It doesn’t prove they both use the same pathway [in the brain], but it’s a possibility.”
Although plenty of questions remain, the benefits of using probiotics to treat human behavior are becoming increasingly obvious. Yogurts like Dannon’s Activia have been marketed with much success as a panacea for all of our intestinal ills. Other probiotic supplements have claimed to support immune health. Probiotics’ potential to treat human behavior is increasingly apparent, but will manufacturers one day toss an anxiety-fighting blend into their probiotic brews?EXPERTS ARE CONVINCED THAT TWEAKING THESE BACTERIA LATER IN LIFE CAN YIELD PROFOUND BEHAVIORAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL CHANGES
It’s a distinct possibility: in one 2013 proof-of-concept study, researchers at UCLA showed that healthy women who consumed a drink with four added probiotic strains twice daily for four weeks showed significantly altered brain functioning on an fMRI brain scan. The women’s brains were scanned while they looked at photos of angry or sad faces, and then asked to match those with other faces showing similar emotions.
Those who had consumed the probiotic drink showed significantly lower brain activity in the neural networks that help drive responses to sensory and emotional behavior. The research is “groundbreaking,” Cryan said, because it’s the first trial to show that probiotics could affect the functioning of the human brain. Still, he notes that the results need to be interpreted with care.
As the research community increasingly lends credence to Greenblatt’s ideas, and public awareness about gut bacteria grows, he’s confident we’ll soon know more about the power of probiotics. “Because of the commercials and the other information that’s out there, patients are beginning to ask,” he said. “They’re much more aware of how important probiotics are.”
Whether all of our mental woes respond to probiotic treatment as dramatically as Greenblatt’s patient Mary remains to be seen. “We have to be very cautious in this field not to be too hyperbolic about what we promise,” Cryan said. Indeed, scientists still aren’t sure exactly which microbial species are part of a healthy microbiome, nor do they know whether certain bacterial strains are absolutely vital to mental functioning, or whether the right balance is what’s key. Furthermore, research still hasn’t parsed which illnesses might be affected by the microbiome and, therefore, treatable using probiotics. “There are beginning to be suggestions that this type of probiotic treatment is worth pursuing,” Bienenstock said. “Whether we can use this to improve people’s lives, well, the door is just beginning to open on this.”
By MICHAEL BLAUSTEIN Last Updated: 10:48 AM, March 27, 2013 Posted: 10:46 AM, March 27, 2013
Researchers might have found the Holy Grail in the war against cancer, a miracle drug that has killed every kind of cancer tumor it has come in contact with.
The drug works by blocking a protein called CD47 that is essentially a "do not eat" signal to the body's immune system, according to Science Magazine.
This protein is produced in healthy blood cells but researchers at Stanford University found that cancer cells produced an inordinate amount of the protein thus tricking the immune system into not destroying the harmful cells.
With this observation in mind, the researchers built an antibody that blocked cancer's CD47 so that the body's immune system attacked the dangerous cells.
So far, researchers have used the antibody in mice with human breast, ovary, colon, bladder, brain, liver and prostate tumors transplanted into them. In each of the cases the antibody forced the mice's immune system to kill the cancer cells.
"We showed that even after the tumor has taken hold, the antibody can either cure the tumor or slow its growth and prevent metastasis," said biologist Irving Weissman of the Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California.
One side effect of the treatment was that healthy cells were subjected to short-term attacks by the mice's immune system, but the effect was nothing in comparison to the damage done to the cancer cells.
Weissman's group recently received a $20 million dollar grant to move their research from mouse to human safety testing.
Everyone has that one thing they'd like to change about themselves -- quitting the booze, getting in shape, kicking that public masturbation habit -- but they continually put it off, because making major lifestyle changes is hard. Damn it, science, it's the 21st century! Where's the pill that makes all of our human flaws disappear?
Not far away, apparently. At this very moment, they are testing ...
#5. A Pill That Replaces Exercise
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When it comes to the competition between food and exercise, how could exercise ever stand a chance when food is just so goddamn delicious? That's apparently a sentiment many Americans share, because according to the CDC, over one-third of us are fatasses. See, what we need is a pill that just magically makes fat go away, and we're not talking about the bullshit diet pills they have on supplement shelves now (hint: their "appetite suppressant" is just caffeine). Well, it looks like the future is going to be an awesome place for people who hate to sweat.
Getty Say goodbye to your extra chins and hello to ... everything else you're already doing.
Researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have discovered a hormone that mimics exercising by increasing the body's ability to burn fat, theoretically allowing you to get in shape even as you watch Firefly marathons while choking down Hungry-Man frozen dinners. (PROTIP: You're supposed to cook them first.) The newly identified hormone, called irisin, causes the body to transform white "bad" fat into brown "good" fat, which generates heat. The result is the same as exercise -- burning calories, improving the processing of insulin ... everything that could bring us every fat guy's greasy wet dream: an exercise pill.
So how did the scientists discover the true potential of irisin? How else? After studying and isolating the hormone, they shot up some roly-poly mice with it. Within 10 days of treatment, the mice had better blood sugar and insulin levels and had lost some weight, with the assumption being that longer exposure would "reduce the damage done by a high-fat diet, protecting mice against diet-induced obesity and diabetes."
Getty For Squeaky, the weight may have gone, but the crippling self-esteem issues remained.
Researchers think that irisin could potentially be used to address a wide range of health problems -- obesity, mental health disorders, neuromuscular diseases like muscular dystrophy -- but come on, we all know what it'll really be used for: getting all the benefits of exercise without doing one iota of the work. After all, isn't that exactly what all of human civilization has been progressing toward for the last thousand years or so?
#4. A Real Hangover (and Possible Alcoholism) Cure
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After thousands of years of headaches, heavy eyelids, and how the hell did the world get so loud?, we might finally have a solution to one of the world's most pressing health issues. That's right -- thanks to the tireless work of scientists who couldn't give less of a shit about that "curing cancer" nonsense, we might soon have a preventive cure for the common hangover. And it'll come in handy-dandy pill form.
Scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles have developed a drug called dihydromyricetin, dubbed DHM, which they claim will drastically reduce hangover symptoms. The drug was developed using chemicals derived from the fruit of the oriental raisin tree, which has been used by people in China to prevent hangovers for over 500 years.
Wiki Thanks, China. See if we give you any of our sweet democracy or morbid obesity.
Once again, the scientists first tested the drugs on rats, which were injected with heavy doses of alcohol and later made to run a maze. Rats that were not given DHM behaved pretty much how you'd expect hung-over rats to behave, stumbling into walls or cowering in a corner, presumably begging the scientists to inject them with some coffee and turn down the damn lights. The rats that were given DHM, however, ran the maze as if they hadn't been given any alcohol, behaving as inquisitively as any sober rat.
According to the researchers, the drug's benefits don't end with curing hangovers: DHM was also shown to be effective at preventing rats from getting drunk in the first place. In another phase of the experiment, the scientists laid some rats on their backs and injected them with a shit-ton of alcohol -- the human equivalent of drinking 15 to 20 beers in two hours, or what many of our readers refer to as "a pretty good start." The researchers then grabbed some popcorn and snickered as the rats tried to right themselves.
Getty "Ha! She's going home with him?"
The liquored-up rodents provided the researchers with 70 minutes of weebly-wobbly hilarity, but rats that were given DHM at the same time as the booze were able to get back on their feet in just five. And long term, DHM prevented the rats from developing cravings for alcohol, effectively keeping them from becoming filthy little disease-ridden alcoholics.
Getty "One puke tray per mouse. Trust us, they'll need every ounce of space."
That's all fine and good for the drunken rodent population of the world, but what about us humans? Well, you don't have to wait long. Human trials of DHM are going on in the USA, but if you really need that hangover cure, you can just book that Korean vacation you've been putting off: Drugs made from the oriental raisin tree have already been approved by the Korean Food & Drug Administration and have been sold in the country since 2008.
#3. Finally, a Male Birth Control Pill
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Ever wonder why there's never been a male version of the birth control pill? Well, for starters, it's a problem of magnitude: To stop a woman from getting pregnant, all you have to do is block a single egg each month, whereas a man produces about 1,000 sperm every single time his heart beats. Then there's also the challenge of getting the drug across the blood-testis barrier, a nifty little roadblock that evolution built to protect a man's tadpoles from any nastiness floating around in his bloodstream. So it's long been considered damn nigh impossible, but researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute told impossible to go fuck itself when they set out to discover a compound that just might result in the first effective and hormone-free birth control pill for men.
Getty "Pbbbft, whatever."
Except that's not quite how it happened. As with many scientific discoveries, this compound's sperm-busting capability was found completely by accident. Dubbed JQ1, the compound was originally intended to be used in anti-cancer drugs, but when they started pumping copious amounts of it into mice, the researchers noticed something peculiar: a conspicuous lack of mouse babies. It turned out that JQ1 drastically lowered the amount of sperm the male mice produced, and those they did produce were gimpy -- if you picture a man's sperm as millions of tiny Michael Phelpses swimming for an Olympic gold medal (a much squishier, egg-shaped gold medal), JQ1 is the molecular compound running around kneecapping all of them with a microscopic baseball bat.
But we haven't even gotten to possibly the most important factor for a drug to be considered viable as a birth control method: reversibility. And JQ1 has that in spades -- when taken off of the drug, the mice were once again free to sire countless little mouse children to repopulate their strange, glass-encased worlds.
Getty Well, some of them.
Of course, there's still a long way to go before the compound makes the jump from mice to men, and it remains to be seen whether guys will even go for a complete reversal of the birth control norm that has existed for half a century. If dudes can't be bothered to roll on a condom, who's to say they will remember to take a pill? Or tell the truth about not taking it?
#2. A Pill That Stops You from Buying Stupid Shit on Impulse
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Do you stare at your credit card bill at the end of the month and wonder when you bought all of that useless shit? Are brown boxes decorated with the curved Amazon.com arrow showing up at your door on a daily basis? There's a name for that condition: oniomania, otherwise known as compulsive shopping.
Getty "I definitely won't regret this later."
And as lame as it sounds, it can be just as serious as any other behavioral disorder. It can lead to ruined credit histories, failed marriages, and theft. But what is a sufferer supposed to do about it, you ask? This isn't like some chemical addiction where it sort of makes sense that a drug could curb the impulse. Are you honestly going to take a pill that magically suppresses the urge to shop?
Well, yeah. Have you even been paying attention to this article at all?
Getty "This will give you liquid shits if you so much as even look at a Macy's."
Scientists at the University of Minnesota gave a drug called memantine to people ages 19 to 59 who suffer from shopaholism. Before the trial began, these people spent up to 61 percent of their annual salary on impulse buys -- these were middle-class folks who devoted as much as 38 hours a week looking for bargains in stores. And while a TLC reality show star might call that "Wednesday," your average American's bank account calls it "Oh dear God, let the torture end." After taking the pill for eight weeks, sufferers engaged in less impulse buying and had "fewer impulsive urges, thoughts, and behavior." Overall, the pill reduced the symptoms of the disorder by freaking half.
The whole thing worked so well, it even made the TV news:
So, how does that possibly work? The drug affects glutamate, a chemical in the brain that is believed to contribute to obsessive-compulsive disorder. Many health professionals think that compulsive shopping is a close cousin of OCD, so treating someone's urge to lock and unlock their door 30 times whenever they leave the house is very similar to treating their overwhelming urge to buy out the underwear bin at Walmart.
Well, shit, if they have a pill that can cure our stupid urges, what else can they cure? How about ...
#1. A Drug That Cures Your Racism
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From crazy dictators blaming recessions on the different-colored scapegoat of the day to your asshole uncle constantly screaming about the world being overrun with jive turkeys, racism is an unfortunate and unavoidable part of life. And what's worse, no matter how many Will Smith movies we watch, there might be a certain part of every one of us that unconsciously fears some different color or creed -- unless you take a pill for it. One that's already available.
Getty "And you're sure this will stop my husband from shooting the TV every time The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air comes on?"
Well, OK, so we might not yet be at the point where you can walk up to a doctor and ask him to hook you up with some pills for your grandpa's inexplicable hatred of Scandinavians. But hey, it's not like science isn't trying -- and succeeding. Recently, some researchers at Oxford University found that they could combat racism using an anxiety drug that's already out:propranolol.
In an experiment, the researchers gave either propranolol or a placebo to a bunch of white people, the most stereotypically racist bunch the researchers could think of (which, in a sense, would make the scientists themselves doubly racist). The participants filled out surveys rating their attitudes toward black people using a scale from 0 to 100, 0 meaning that they wanted to personally push a button that would nuke Atlanta, 100 meaning that they'd like to make sweet love to a Nubian deity and populate the world with their ethnically ambiguous love children. They then repeated the surveys with their feelings toward homosexuals, Muslims, Christians, and drug addicts, which are apparently races now.
Photos.com "I'll have you know that we are a proud, noble, balls-tripping people!"
But wait! you might say. People aren't always honest in these types of surveys -- even to themselves. Some people might sincerely believe that they're colorblind and progressive, but might harbor prejudices buried so deep in their subconscious, they'd need a Ouija board to find them. That's why the scientists then gave them a computerized test that involved sorting faces of different ethnic origins along with words with positive and negative connotations. This test assessed the participants' "implicit racism," the racism that you might harbor but be consciously unaware of.
And guess what? The people who were given the propranolol scored significantly lower on tests of implicit racism. That's right -- the drug actually led to people becoming less racist at a subconscious level. Why did the drug work so well? The Brits believe the reason is that propranolol affects the part of the brain involved in fear and emotional responses. Essentially, the drug calms the symptoms of anxiety, and since racism is thought to be fundamentally founded on fear, calming down one's automatic fear response should also calm down the desire to carpet bomb every country that ends in "stan."
Getty Sadly, for Dale, some aspects of his skinhead life would always remain.
For now, battling racism is strictly an off-label use for propranolol due to the ethical implications of improving people's morals via lozenge. But it's nice to know it's there should you ever need to spike the punch at your local Klan rally.
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Dr. John Apsley has gained fame with his proposition that the lowly baking soda can cure 90 percent of all cancer cases. That’s quite a cont...
