Microbial Influence on the Brain: Microbes are very useful for our body and can have many different properties that are good and bad for our health. As far as the brain, microbes create neuroactive compounds like neurotransmitters and metabolites that help with brain function. Messages from microbes within our gastrointestinal tracts can be carried through your vagus nerve. Without these key elements, our body wouldn’t be able to function as it normally does. Neurotransmitters send signals throughout your whole body and help with pretty much every function that you do.
Brain Influences Microbial Health: Many of the useful microbes that are inside our bodies reside within the gastrointestinal tract. The brain influences that tract along with the immune system, both of which influence the genetic makeup of the microbes. Damage to your brain can cause damage throughout your body including the microbial communities, they may be influenced if your brain’s ability to upkeep the gastrointestinal tract is altered.
Microbial Influence on Mental Health: Since microbes have been found to influence the health of your brain, it would make sense then that they would also have a direct influence your mental health as well. It is thought that when you have proper functioning and relationships with the microbial life and the brain, there are lower levels of depression. During pregnancy, it is found that the influence of microbes can cause people to be born with autism or schizophrenia.
Mental Health on Microbial Life: Depending on the mental state of a person, can influence the item that they eat or the situations that they put themselves in. These environments can affect the microbial health that is within them. An example of this could be someone suffering from depression, in which they may have difficulty with performing daily tasks or feeling motivated to go and exercise. If they drastically increase in weight, this alters the ratio of specifics within their gastrointestinal tracts.
As with most influences on health, each aspect has a chance of promoting health or a chance of promoting disease. As far as brain influences, it controls the certain gastrointestinal environments within your body in which controls the types of microbial species and ratios that grow. These ratios can be beneficial to your body or they can be harmful. In return, the microbes within your body can influence your brain through the vagus nerve and immune responses. Mental health also has this type of relationship. Certain environments can create beneficial or harmful microbial life that can cause either good or bad effect. It forms these effects that people can be “normal” or not. Potentially having bad mental health can be harmful to one’s self by promoting negative influences on your body which in turn influences the microbial health. It seems that each has the potential to be beneficial or harmful.
