Can gut bacteria influence brain disease? The microbiome, Parkinson’s and dementia | William Li

0:00William Li:Welcome to Live Well Be Well, a show to help high performers improve their health and well-being.

0:10We're talking about the brain and the gut together.

0:14William Li:And you sent me, it must have been about a year ago now, a probiotic PS128 that potentially could support Parkinson's disease. not 100 % confirmed, but really interesting theory. People might not even know what that number is, might not understand what that means. Can you talk a little bit about how we might be able to target the gut microbiome for potentially treating neurodegeneration in the future? Right. Well, so here we are. We've been talking about the connection between the gut and the brain, the fact that the brain has its own healthy microbiome, well, that actually unlocks kind of a box that allows us to peer in to say, well, what else could we be doing to make healthier brains maybe with healthier bacteria?

1:05And the clues are starting to emerge. Again, you know, we're at the beginning of a new era of discovering how to achieve brain health. You know, we used to think, well, as you get older, the brain is going to decline. not necessarily, that if you damage the brain or their brain gets damaged, whether by trauma or by a stroke or even by cancer, it's not going to regenerate. Wrong. It will actually regenerate. And that, you know, pretty much if you lose certain functions, like whether it's smell or whether it's even vision, that once it's gone, it's gone. Not necessarily true. And so a lot of these previously long-held tenets about brain health are now, you know, just starting to be reconsidered when we looked at bacteria, healthy bacteria.

1:56So we do know that certain bacteria can actually influence the brain. We'll talk about two of them. First is Lactobacillus plantarum. So Lactobacillus is a whole class of bacteria that are really, really important for health. There's hundreds of them, different types of lactobacillus bacilli. And lactobacillus plantarum is one of them. Now, each type of genus and species, each type, each flavor of bacteria has lots of subflavors. You know, it's kind of like, I don't know, you look at, get coffee, you know, look at all the different types of coffee. You can have a pour over, you can have an espresso, and bacteria the same way.

2:35So one of the interesting things is lactobacillus plantarum has been shown when delivered as a probiotic to smooth out and slow down the progression of Parkinson's disease. These are early clinical studies, but the fact that a single bacteria could actually have some measurable, discernible clinical effect when in people whose Parkinson's were not able to be well controlled. Now, this is early Parkinson's and they're looking at progression. So you can slow down that inevitable decline with bacteria. I had a really, really good friend of mine who passed away from ALS, which is Lou Gehrig's disease.

3:18That's a horrible neurodegenerative condition. We were lifelong friends, and I just watched him decline. In his last years, we were looking for, I was looking for bacteria that could actually help improve the brain. And that's how I first started to look at Lactobacillus plantarum. Now, he passed away from his condition, but the work has continued to go on in Lactobacillus plantarum. So it's called PS128. More studies are going on on that, but it just shows us just the power of the bacteria and the brain. The other thing that we know is that Alzheimer's and other types of dementia seem to be linked to bacteria that are harmful in our mouth.

4:08Gum disease, gingivitis, inflammation of the gums due to bad bacteria growing in there, dysbiosis in our gut, like irritable bowel, think about irritable mouth syndrome, right? So like, except that we don't see it, we don't feel it the same way. You're not running to the bathroom all the time. You're just going about your way, but these unhealthy bacteria may be sending signals to upset the brain microbiome as well. So it kind of makes sense as we're discovering this and wondering, could it be that simple things that improve our mouth microbiome or a lower gut microbiome could actually reshape our trajectory of brain health?

4:53One of the bacteria that actually, lactobacillus, that actually helps the brain is lactobacillus Ruterii. That's R-E-U-T-E-R-I, Ruterii. This is an amazing bacteria. It used to be present frequently in the human gut. And over the last century, especially with the advent of antibiotics, it became less and less predictable. But we find it in foods. Lactobusus Ruterii is very important. Let's first talk about the body. So it turns out that this is a bacteria that in pregnant moms, hitches a ride on blood cells around eight months in pregnancy, and then circulates in her bloodstream. And like catching an Uber, it gets dropped off in the nipple so that when the baby takes the first suckle, a month later, it squirts some lactobacillus down the baby's mouth into their gut.

5:46Pretty amazing that a mom's colon bacteria could make its way into the mom's blood, get dropped off into her nipple, and then be delivered to the baby. So this is a kind of mapping, you know, kind of like the, how does this even occur? You know, and do bacteria like have their own ways where they can actually find their way to different organs? We don't know that. But we do know that lactobacillus reuteri actually does impact the brain. And it impacts the brain by causing our brains to release oxytocin. oxytocin being the social hormone is a hormone that floods us when we see somebody at the airport that we haven't seen in a long time that you like and you go up to arrival gate and give them a big hug you feel great that's oxytocin when you get a kiss not just a peck on the cheek but a deep french kiss oxytocin have an orgasm that's massive amounts of oxytocin coming out and this is a bacteria that actually helps our brain dribble out oxytocin.

6:52And so again, the brain is not just a collection of neurons that solve math problems, but also helps us be that social organism that we talked about that's so important for healthy aging.

7:06William Li:Thanks so much for listening. To hear the full episode, there's a link in the description.

7:18Thank you.