Could Gut Bacteria Explain the Link Between Stress and Autoimmune Disease?

Let’s talk about autoimmune disease and particularly with its relevance to stress and bacteria in the gut with even microbiota.

As you know, I like reading studies, lots of different types of studies and it’s exciting to see now, finally, some connections linking stress with autoimmunity through the gut. What they did is they got a hold of two groups of mice. One group, the control group, they were okay. But the other group, what they did is they exposed that group, all right, over a 10 day period to multiple births throughout that time to dominant aggressive mice. But the control group, they didn’t do that. They were left basically on their own. And they found the difference in the gut composition to be quite profound.

The stressed group had two types of bacteria in much higher amounts than the other group, for example, and these particular bacteria have also been found to be higher in multiple sclerosis. So what’s happened is the stress, basically, has altered the gene expression and even the composition of the bacteria in the gut and also improved the ability for translocation for these bacteria to move outside of the gut and then into lymph nodes around the digestive system. In these mice, they found elevated T-cells, okay, and even damaged genes with very high stress as a consequence of this sort of bullying kind of thing.

Other Related Questions

So you can imagine if you’re a lady working in an office and you’re, say 45 or 50, and you’ve got a terrible boss or a bully, you’ve got coworkers that are no good, and you’ve got a husband who’s sort of okay, but not really that good, and you’ve got not much support, and you’re stressed and stressed. Is it any wonder? You might be like that mouse in that cage, being bullied, and this could be one of the reasons.

I’ve always said for many years now that stress is one of the biggest killers, silent killers. And in time, in many years from now, it will be seen that stress kills more people than all bombs, and guns, and drugs, and poisons on earth. And people do to themselves, they don’t even know it. They get stressed out. Their gut slowly starts going down. The gene expression changes. The bacteria change. Inflammation goes up. Wham! Autoimmune disease. One day it’ll all come out.