Can probiotics help with depression?

  • Mar 28,2024
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A new research recently claims that there is a connection between our brains and our  guts and how the bacteria in our digestive tract may can be possible to treat mental illness. A new review is suggesting that food supplements containing microbes might have positive influence in our gut and help us to fight against depression. Allan Young who is a professor of mood disorders at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience  in an interview for Science Media Centre in London that this is a quality research but it is based on a data that has been published before .

This examination supports the idea that probiotics can help heal depression but for the things to be clarified  more research in that field is needed - says Young who wasn’t involved in the research. Many researchers from different universities looked in a lots of studies published in the past 10 years that looked at how compounds help our microbiome , may be helpful for adults who suffer depression or anxiety. Most of them were not strong enough to be included in the review, only seven of them were robust enough, but all of them showed  improvements when measuring the effect of taking probiotics ,for example, compared without any treatment. The researchers said their review had several minuses like none of those studies lasted long enough and the amount of participants was not very big. So this makes difficult the making of conclusion if this research is relevant enough or if this can cause unwanted side effects, they said. David Curtis who is a consultant in University College London is saying that there is no prove that probiotics have effect on our mood and this is unlikely. Although these studies show some benefits of probiotic effects on depression,  scientists say that maybe there are some are other studies that show no effect on human mood if using probiotics and nobody talks about them .

Curtis claims that people with mental illnesses should search for medical advice not to try treat themselves with supplements which are not scientifically proven. Review in journal BMJ Nutrition said  how probiotics could effect on  depression is unknown, but surely could be twice as numerous.This is because probiotics might help to reduce the production of  inflammatory chemicals and the other thing is that people who suffer depression often have other conditions and this treatment may cause  problems with how people experiencing depression by making them less severe. A review published by the American Gastroenterological Association said there's not enough evidence to recommend the use of probiotics. He says that scientists are still learning about the complex connections between the brain and the gut.

It is certainly possible that microbiome therapies could improve some aspects of depression and anxiety says Geoffrey Preidis, a pediatric gastroenterologist .For now probiotics have only benefits for our bodies but in conclusion we have to say that no matter how good are these, an inappropriate treat could cause us problems.