Palliative fecal therapy
Fecal transplantation calmed rats after spinal cord injury
Polina Loseva, N+1
Intestinal bacteria transplantation may be useful for patients with spinal cord injury — this is the conclusion scientists came to after experiments on rats. The animals were slightly injured and then forced to undergo behavioral tests. Usually, after the operation, the rats showed increased anxiety, but after they were transplanted with the microbiota of healthy animals, they became calmer. Probably, in this way it will be possible to reduce psychological stress in people with impaired mobility after injury. The work was published in the journal PLOS One (Schmidt et al., Fecal transplant prevents gut dysbiosis and anxiety-like behavior after spinal cord injury in rats).
Medicine can not solve the problem of spinal cord injuries in all cases yet. Therefore, scientists are looking for ways to alleviate the condition of patients who have been completely or partially immobilized. Often at the same time they experience anxiety and suicidal moods. It is not clear what exactly they are caused by, but at the same time it is known that changes in the composition of the intestinal microbiota can affect the mental health and emotions of mammals.
To test whether symbiotic bacteria are associated with changes in behavior after injury, Emma Schmidt from The University of Alberta in Canada and her colleagues performed an operation on rats simulating spinal injuries. After that, they were released into a maze with closed and open corridors raised above the surface. The operated rats, although they retained the ability to move, practically did not go out into the open corridors, while the animals from the control group spent about 13 percent of the time in them. The researchers interpreted these data as an indicator of increased anxiety in rats after surgery.
Collecting stool samples from animals, scientists also found changes in the composition of their intestinal microbiome. If before the operation they noticed a lot of enterococci in bacterial crops, then after the operation their number decreased, but a lot of E. coli appeared, which was practically absent before the operation (p < 0.01).
Scientists tried to correct the situation with the help of fecal transplantation: rats received bacterial transplants from healthy relatives at the time of the operation and for another two days after it. According to the results of the experiment, the researchers compared four groups of animals: the control group — bacterial donors, rats after a "harmless" operation, rats with spinal injury without transplantation, and rats with damage and transplantation. They were all subjected to standard behavior tests.
It turned out that the animals that received the transplant spent as much time in the open arms of the elevated maze as healthy rats. In the test with a dark and light room, they spent even more time in a light room than the control group and stayed less before entering it, which also indicates reduced anxiety. At the same time, fecal transplantation did not affect recovery after injury in any way: in animals that survived the operation, the size and condition of the damaged area did not differ.
Thus, the researchers indirectly confirmed that depression and increased anxiety after spinal cord injuries may be associated with changes in microbial composition. The mechanisms of this are unclear, but the authors believe that damage to spinal nerves can, for example, affect the level of inflammation in the body and indirectly affect bacteria. Anyway, spinal cord injuries have added to the list of cases where fecal transplantation can be useful.
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