It has long been known that the tension caused by constant stress that we call stress damages health in different ways. Now, a work from Brigham Young University (United States) and Jiao Tong University of Shanghai (China) affects this relationship.
His experiment with female mice exposed to continuous stress has shown that their intestinal microbiota – the set of bacteria that live in the intestine and are key to the body – changes to resemble that of rodents subjected to a high-fat diet .
Laura Bridgewater, a Brigham Young microbiologist, is among the authors of this research published in Nature. In statements to the website of his university, Bridgewater comments that “stress can be harmful in many ways, but the novelty of our work is that it links this problem with specific changes in the gut microbiota of females.”
Suffered mice
This researcher and her colleagues in China used a large group of eight-week-old mice of both sexes for their experiment. They exposed half the males and half the females to a greasy diet. 16 weeks later, all the specimens were subjected to mild stressful situations for 18 days in a row.
Before and after the stress tests, the scientists analyzed the mice’s feces to find out how nervousness affected their gut microbiota. They also measured the animals’ anxiety by studying their movements.
Gender differences
The researchers found striking differences in the results based on the sex of the rodents. Males on a high-fat diet were more anxious than females on the same unhealthy diet, and responded to stress by showing changes in their activity.
They also discovered stress-related alterations in the gut microbiota, but these only affected females. The microorganisms in the digestive system of stressed mice resembled those of animals that ate very greasy food.
The question is the same as always: can these results be extrapolated to humans? The authors of the work are convinced that their conclusions will have implications for people, but admit that a lot of research is required to confirm this.
In any case, Bridgewater stresses that “in our society, women tend to suffer more depression and anxiety than men. Our study suggests that there could be an explanation for this phenomenon in the different responses to stress of the intestinal microbiota of males and females ”.
It should be remembered that, according to recent studies, the abundant bacterial flora that inhabits the digestive system can alter our mood and behavior. The intestine would function as a second brain and changing its microorganisms could be directly related to our stress levels.
