New Poo, New You? Fecal Transplants Reverse Signs of Brain Aging in Mice
upstart writes:
New poo, new you? Fecal transplants reverse signs of brain aging in mice:
As you age, your brain slows down. You may forget where you left your glasses or have trouble picking up a new skill. Now there's hope from rodent experiments that some of these declines could be reversed-but it takes guts. New research shows a transplant of gut microbes, in the form of feces, from young mice to old ones can turn back the clock on the aging brain.
[...] The bacteria in our intestines influence everything from our daily moods to our overall health. This gut microbiome" also changes over the course of our lives. But whereas some studies have shown young blood can have rejuvenating effects on old mice, the microbiome's impact on age-related declines hasn't been clear.
[...] The first thing the team noticed was that the gut microbiomes of the old mice given young mouse microbes began to resemble those of the younger ones. The common gut microbe Enterococcus became much more abundant in old mice, just as it is in young mice, for example.
There were changes in the brain as well. The hippocampus of old mice-a region of the brain associated with learning and memory-became more physically and chemically similar to the hippocampus of young mice. The old mice that received young mouse poop also learned to solve mazes faster and were better at remembering the maze layout on subsequent attempts, the team reports today in Nature Aging. None of these effects was seen in old mice given old mouse feces.
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