Reading the Research: Linking the digestive tract and the brain

Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.

Today's article provides more evidence for the gut being a vital part of your mental and emotional health.  Gut health can be a major quality-of-life issue for autistic people, both adults and children.  I thought it was kind of funny that the article insisted scientists had known about this link for a while, but it's completely ignored in standard medical checkups or even more specific complaints. Most of what I learned about gut health, I learned from my LENS doctor. Y'know, the one classified as alternative medicine.

I was pleased to see this was a study done on humans, though I could certainly wish for more than 16 participants.  While I recognize animal studies are an important part of the scientific process, and certain things can't be done to human subjects, I'm still happiest reading the results of studies like these.  They're most applicable to life. 

I'd be curious to see what the adoptee outcomes would have been like if they'd been given probiotics while developing.  At present, I routinely take two different probiotics, which seem to help me digest things better as well as support my mood. Perhaps the probiotics would increase the diversity of the kids' digestive tracts, and help their brain function look more like the traditionally-raised children?  

I'm not certain you can do that kind of long term study ethically, though. Often if you're testing a new treatment, you have two groups. One receives the treatment immediately and is compared to the second, which receives the treatment after the study is done. You are therefore not permanently withholding treatment from anyone, which is more ethical than what I was suggesting. The issue is that it can take a good while to mend the biodiversity of a gut. 

Basically, it's not a quick or cheap research idea.  Hopefully something like it will come through the pipeline sooner or later, because there's still a distinct lack of understanding about the subject in most places I've been recently. 

(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter, which has links and brief comments on studies that were interesting, but didn't get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)