UCLA Study Links Gut Microbiome Activity to Brain Resilience

Groundbreaking research from UCLA Health Sciences has found an interesting connection between resilience in people and some activities in the brain and the gut microbiome. Resilient individuals are neurologically more active in brain parts associated with cognitive augmentation and emotional control. Further, they are mindful and possess a more excellent capability for expressing feelings. The Nature Mental Health-published study also found resilient individuals exhibited gut microbiome activity in a way that suggests a healthy gut with low inflammation and a strong gut barrier.

Studies of gut microbiome activity—unlike the majority of typical studies in this area, focusing on disease contexts like anxiety and depression by researchers at UCLA—are designed to probe the gut-brain connection within healthy, resilient individuals who have a successful ability to buffer stress from factors like discrimination and social isolation. Senior author Dr. Arpana Gupta, who co-directs the UCLA Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center, said: "If we can identify what a healthy resilient brain and microbiome look like, then we can develop targeted interventions to those areas to reduce stress."

The researchers surveyed the participants for their resilience traits—like high trust in one's instincts and positive acceptance of change—grouped into highly or lowly resilient populations. The participants underwent imaging, MRI, and stool samples. The results showed that the highly resilient group presented less anxiousness and judgmentalism and brain activity related to better emotional and cognitive control. In the highly resilient group, the gut microbiomes excreted fewer metabolites. They had a lower gene activity in inflammation, as well as a healthy gut barrier, than the low resilient group.

The unique microbiome signatures present in those with high resilience were also rather shocking to investigators. "It's truly a whole-body phenomenon that doesn't just modulate the brain but the entire body: it affects your microbiome and what metabolites it produces," Gupta said. He added that the following steps will be to examine whether interventions developed to increase resilience might alter the activity of both the brain and the gut microbiomes. "We could have treatments that target both the brain and the gut that can one day prevent disease," Gupta said.

This groundbreaking research paves new ways toward creating therapies that boost resilience and health in general by targeting both brain and gut microbiome activities.