Gut/Brain Axis: Health, Anxiety and Brain Fog

Previously overlooked, we now know that the 100 trillion gut microbes of healthy people influence their wellbeing in substantial ways. Those bugs and their DNA vary from one healthy person to another and from one unhealthy person to another. Meanwhile, as practitioners, we are witnessing an epidemic rise in the incidence of inflammatory conditions associated with the gut-brain axis dysfunction, including anxiety and brain fog.

Developing research shows these conditions are associated with an imbalance (dysbiosis) in the gut microbiome and often increased intestinal permeability. There is constant talk between the gut and brain: Some of it travels along the vagus nerve, and some of it travels in the blood, especially via nutrients, hormones, proteins, peptides, and inflammatory messengers like antibodies and cytokines. The good news is that while abnormal gut microbiota can lead to dysfunction of the brain body and cause brain symptoms like anxiety and brain fog, correcting perturbations in gut health is an emerging strategy to address such symptoms.

Currently, the lifetime risk of anxiety is 30 percent, and higher in women. Mainstream medicine taught us that anxiety is a response to perceived threat, whereas depression is a response to perceived harm or loss. For decades, anxiety has been treated with benzodiazepines, in an effort to mask symptoms, and occasionally with a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor or a new generation of similar pharmaceuticals. Turns out that a more accurate characterization is that these conditions are manifestations of a gut/brain axis that is out of homeostasis. There are five key ways that dysbiotic gut flora can promote anxiety, depression, and cognitive decline: by making your gut wall leaky, by manipulating your stress response (and therefore your hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal/thyroid/ gonadal axes), by disrupting your immune response, by causing chronic inflammation in the body and brain (neuroinflammtion), and by producing harmful peptides and other chemical messengers. In this interactive presentation, you will learn personalized lifestyle medicine strategies for improving intestinal wall integrity—specifically with the use of targeted dietary and lifestyle interventions—including nutrigenomic approaches, “behaviorceuticals” (physical activities that improve mental health), and targeted prebiotics and probiotics.