New studies link the imbalance of bacterial flora to childhood epilepsy and hearing damage and pave the way for new therapies also based on diet, prebiotics and probiotics.
The brain is a bit like a very attentive manager: it likes everything to work in balance and hates sudden changes. However, to maintain this balance – which doctors call homeostasis – it must continually adapt to what is happening around us. But what happens when this delicate mechanism gets stuck?
The research of the Mnesys program coordinated by Maurizio Taglialatela, pharmacologist at the Federico II University of Naples, aims precisely to understand the mechanisms by which balance is maintained but also what disturbs it and how sometimes the basis of diseases and disorders is a lack of adaptation to difficult environmental conditions.
In many conditions, what alters the “tranquility” of the brain are, for example, the signals that arrive from an anomalous intestinal flora: the microbiota, the population of bacteria that lives in our intestine, is proving to be one of the most decisive elements for the well-being of the brain because there is a constant dialogue with the intestine, in both directions.
epilepsy and bacteria
The Mnesys studies are confirming this for example in epilepsy, under the lens of researchers from the Department of Neuroscience, Rehabilitation, Ophthalmology, Genetics and Maternal-Child Sciences of the University of Genoa: it has clearly emerged that in children with epilepsy the brain-intestine communication is altered and that an anomalous microbiota (the so-called dysbiosis, an imbalance between bacterial species) is associated with a greater susceptibility to seizures, with possible effects on the outcomes of the disease and especially on response to treatment. By comparing the microbiota of children with epilepsy and healthy peers, for example, it was observed that in the microbiota of patients there is a characteristic “signature”, that is, a significant increase in the quantity of bacteria of the genus Hungatellaand that in children with disease resistant to antiepileptics the quantity of the bacterium changes Eubacterium siraeum. As Pasquale Striano, coordinator of studies on childhood epilepsy, observes, «targeted interventions to modify the microbiota, such as the ketogenic diet, the administration of probiotics (microorganisms that can bring benefits, ed) and/or prebiotics (fibres, ed) or fecal transplant may represent effective strategies to improve resistant epilepsy in children and, probably, also in adults.”
Unexpected news is also emerging from Mnesys regarding the importance of the brain-intestine axis for the correct functioning of the peripheral nervous system: the team of Anna Rita Fetoni, otolaryngologist, audiologist at the Federico II University of Naples has discovered in experimental animals that alterations in the microbiota that increase intestinal inflammation are associated with anomalies in the shape and function of the cochlea, a part of the ear that is fundamental for hearing.
Fetoni explains that these anomalies «increase, for example, oxidative stress, inflammatory damage and immune activation; on the contrary, modulation of the microbiota could reverse cochlear damage.”
