#faecal-sampling

#faecal-sampling

Jade Boden-de Mel first experienced 'unbearable' pain at 17 but says medics could not identify the cause and prescribed the contraceptive pill to manage it.

Research increasingly demonstrates that healthy nutrition improves mental health, and an entirely new subspecialty has formed to support this. Nutritional psychiatry is expanding rapidly, with research growing 15-fold from 2000 to 2024, reflecting the increasing acceptance of diet's role in mental health.

Young, two-month-old lab mice housed with older, 18-month-old mice showed really impaired cognition. Researchers exposed young mice raised in a sterile, microbe-free environment to gut bacteria from old mice, causing the younger animals to perform worse on cognitive tests, as if they had prematurely aged, just like the cohoused mice.

Gut bacteria are crucial to ensuring healthy digestion and defecation. But two species of bacteria may also be the cause of constipation: according to a new study, Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron and Akkermansia muciniphila appear to work in concert to break down colonic mucin, the slimy coating in our colons that keeps our poo moving along. Too little mucin means a drier and more constipation-prone colon.

Everything on my Instagram feed at the moment is about worms and parasites, she told the Wall Street Journal, ominously adding: I don't know what the heck is going to come out. Maybe your social media feeds aren't full of posts about worms and parasites, in which case, congratulations. But type parasite cleanse into TikTok or Instagram and you'll be inundated with so-called experts peddling expensive herbal supplements that promise to detox the body and rid it of harmful worms and parasites.

There are some communities that are very unhealthy where the diversity is higher. Low diversity is not a universal marker. We found something that at first seemed surprising. That a healthy microbiome has lots of competition. These bugs are all going after the same food. In an unhealthy gut, on the other hand, you see tight cooperation - microorganisms are helping each other out.

Fecal transplants from old female mice appear to boost fertility and ovarian health in younger ones. The findings, detailed in a study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Aging, indicate a direct link between gut health and reproductive health in the animals. They could also hold implications for future research into how the microbiome influences ovarian function and fertility in humans.

The article from the journal argues that the gut-autism axis is a house of cards built on lousy studies with inconsistent data. They assert that the studies are contradictory and that too much emphasis is placed on dubious mouse models. It is notoriously challenging to nail down microbial causes of disease—it is hard enough to simply identify a normal microbiome.

Intermittent fasting within an eight-hour window can significantly reduce symptoms of Crohn's disease, a new study has found. Crohn's disease, according to the NHS, is a long-term condition where part of the gut becomes inflamed. It cannot currently be cured and the common symptoms include: diarrhoea, blood or mucus in your poo and stomach pain. Researchers at the University of Calgary found that time-restricted feeding can reduce disease activity by 40 per cent and halve abdominal discomfort in over 12 weeks in people living with Crohn's disease.