I wish above all things that thou mayest... be in health....
3 John 1:2
"Interestingly, there is a growing body of work showing that there is
communication between the gut and brain, now commonly dubbed the gut–brain axis.
The disruption of the gut–brain axis contributes to a diverse range of
diseases, including Parkinson’s disease and
irritable bowel syndrome.
Consequently, the developing field of gut–brain axis research is rapidly
growing. In 2013, a couple of studies showed that
high salt intake leads to profound immune changes in the gut,
resulting in increased vulnerability of the brain to autoimmunity—when
the immune system attacks its own healthy cells and tissues by mistake,
suggesting that perhaps the gut can communicate with the brain via
immune signaling.
Research
published in “Nature Neuroscience” shows another connection: immune signals sent from the gut can
compromise the
brain’s blood vessels, leading to deteriorated brain
heath and cognitive impairment. Surprisingly, the research unveils a
previously undescribed gut–brain connectionmediated by the immune
system and indicates that excessive salt might negatively impact brain
health in humans through impairing the brain’s blood vesselsregardless
of its effect on blood pressure.
This research proposes new therapeutic targets for countering stroke—the
second leading cause of death worldwide—and cognitive dysfunction.
Reducing salt intake is applicable to people around the globe, as nearly
every adult consumes too much salt:
on average 9–12 grams per day or around twice the recommended maximum
level of intake (5 grams) by the World Health Organization.
The
researchers used mice, and found thatimmune responses in the small
intestines set off a cascade of chemical responses reaching the brain’s
blood vessels, reducing blood flow to the cortex and hippocampus, two
brain regions crucial for learning and memory. This, in turn, brought a
decline in tests of cognitive performance. The impairment in learning
and memory was clear even in the absence of high blood pressure; they
observed that the gut is reacting to the salt overload and directing
immune signals that lay the basis for deterioration throughout the
brain’s vital
vascular complex and compromise cognitive function. While
this study has only been carried out on research animals so far, the
scientists believe it's likely that much of the same applies to people.
Lowering
salt intake has been shown to have beneficial effects to overall
health, so the researchers wanted to know whether these effects extend
to this newly identified signaling cascade that begins in the gut and
targets the brain’s blood vessels to, ultimately, affect cognitive
function. When the mice were returned to a normal diet after being on a
high salt diet, the detrimental health effects caused by excess salt
intake were erased.
The implications of this newly identified gut–brain connection
extend to several autoimmune disorders, including multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, and inflammatory bowel disease,
that have been shown to activate the same immune signaling pathway
implicated in this study. These autoimmune disorders have a high stroke
risk and are linked to poorly functioning blood vessels in the nervous
system." ScientificAmerican
