New Research Suggests that Schizophrenia might Ultimately be Caused by Gut Disbyosis

Schizophrenia – a severe mental disorder which affects over 21 million people around the word – has quite naturally been characterised as a pathological brain condition of not-quite-known molecular aetiology.

But what if it‘s actually an intestinal disease, or – a neurological condition which originates from an imbalance of the gut microbiome? Apart from fascinating theoretical implications that would likely also result in a substantial reduction of human suffering.

If a new study, recently published in the journal Science Advances, is replicated and the specific mechanisms behind the observed effects are elucidated, we might have to start thinking of reassigning schizophrenia to a different class of disease altogether.

According to Ma-Ling Wong, even though so far we‘ve understood it as a brain problem, perhaps it would be wise to “re-examine this line of thinking and consider that maybe the gut has an important role”.

Odd as it may sound, interactions between gut disbyosis and mental health issues, ranging from anxiety and memory deficits to motor problems and depression, have been known to researchers for a while now – a new study linking atypical gut bugs to schizophrenia has been published in Nature Microbiology just last Monday.

To investigate the connection, Wong and colleagues sequenced the genetic material in stool samples taken from patients with schizophrenia (both medicated and otherwise) and a number of healthy controls from the First Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University in China.

Results showed that patients with the disease both had less diverse microbiomes and also harboured some unique types of bacteria, which enabled the researchers to fairly accurately differentiate between schizophrenic and healthy subjects on the basis of gut bacteria composition alone.

Even more intriguingly, bug-free mice given faecal transplants from schizophrenic patients started to exhibit schizophrenia-like symptoms, which did not occur with transplants from healthy subjects.

Establshing a link between the gut and mental health could give medical professionals “a completely new pathway toward treating schizophrenia,” said co-lead author on the study Julio Licinio. “No treatments that we give today are based on a change of the microbes in the gut. So if you could show that would change behavior in a positive way, we would have a whole new way to approach schizophrenia.”

Sources: study, blogs.discovermagazine.com.