Researchers at the David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA, have identified brain-gut microbiome profiles associated with resilience to stress. They put the cost to the US economy of stress-related time off work and the necessary healthcare at $300 billion. Resilience includes positive acceptance of change, tolerance of challenges, tenacity and the ability to recover after stressful events.
Most research investigating resilience has focused on its correlations with personality traits. The microbiome has already been implicated in conferring stress resilience. The UCLA team set out to determine how resilience is related among other things, to microbiome function. Given the microbiome’s role in influencing psychological resilience, they hypothesized that high resilience would be associated with good microbiome function supporting gut health. Evidence for this would include the existence of pathways supporting gut microbial growth and diversity, and metabolites supporting anti-inflammatory processes and gut-barrier integrity.
The team took 116 healthy subjects aged 18 to 60, recruited from the Los Angeles community through advertising, of whom 44 were identified as high resilience and 72 as low resilience. Through clinical and psychological questionnaires, stool samples and MRI scans, a neurological and gut health assessment was made.
The results showed that the high resilience group, in addition to possessing the ability to be more psychologically adaptive, also had a microbiome which supported gut barrier integrity.
The researchers conclude by saying “Some clinical implications to explore are whether dietary modifications, prebiotics, probiotics or other clinical interventions (for example, faecal transplantation) may improve coping and resilience to stress. Collectively, our findings suggest that features of the brain and the gut microbiome work together to build stress-resilience.”
(Stress-resilience impacts psychological wellbeing as evidenced by brain–gut microbiome interactions. Nature Mental Health Journal, 21 June 2024.)