The importance of the gut microbiota—the microorganisms found in our bodies—to our health has become increasingly clear recently, as more and more research is published.
Everything from how we respond to stress and negative stimuli to our weight and mental health, to our susceptibility to autoimmune diseases like type 1 diabetes and lupus, can be influenced.
Using animal studies, a recent study published in The Journal of Immunology found a link between the gut microbiota and the neurodevelopmental disorder autism. However, researchers say that the mother's microbiota has a greater impact on the likelihood of developing autism than the child's.
“The microbiome can shape the developing brain in many ways,“ said John Lukens, lead researcher and a doctoral student at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.“The microbiome is really important in calibrating how the immune system of the offspring will respond to infection, injury or stress.“
In the case of autism, this connection may be related to a specific molecule that the immune system produces called interleukin-17a (also known as IL-17a).
The molecule has already been linked to diseases such as psoriasis, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. It has also been shown to play an important role in preventing infections, especially fungal ones. Importantly, it can also affect how the brain grows while still in the womb.
A team of scientists suppressed IL-17a in laboratory mice to test their theory that the cytokine could cause autism.
Female mice from two different laboratories were selected by the researchers. The mice from the first lab had a gut microbiota that predisposed them to an inflammatory response triggered by IL-17a, while the mice from the second lab (the control) did not.
The first group of mice exhibited neurotypical behavior at birth when the IL-17a molecule was artificially suppressed as a preventative for inflammatory responses triggered by IL-17a.
However, the pups born to mothers from the first group later developed an autism-like neurological disorder affecting social and repetitive behavior after being left to grow up without further human intervention.
The researchers used the feces of the mice from the first group to perform fecal transplants into the mice from the second group to test whether this was caused by the group's distinctive microbiota.
Here, the goal was to change the microbiota of the second group to more closely match the first. As expected, the children in the second group later developed a neurological disorder resembling autism.
While these are early studies and may not apply to human pregnancy, they represent an intriguing line of research into autism and offer compelling evidence that the health of the mother's gut contributes to some degree to the development of neurological disorders.
The next step, Lukens says, is to determine which aspects of the mother's microbiome are associated with the development of autism and see if they can find such correlations in humans.
There are a number of other molecules to consider. IL-17a may be a single component in a much bigger picture, Lukens suggests.
Source: dailypositiveinfo.com