Psychoactive drugs and the microbiome

Hippocrates said ‘all disease begins in the gut.‘ This quote was used in the title of a paper by Lyon (2018), which asks: ‘what is the evidence that gut microbes can affect the brain, and could we really treat brain disorders by changing the composition of the gut microbiota?‘

The question is attracting increasing global interest from researchers, with Cork, Ireland, becoming a growing centre of excellence. Dr Niall Hyland is a pharmacologist and senior physiology lecturer at APC Microbiome Ireland, a world leading Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre based at University College Cork. Hyland recently beat a field of almost 200 international applicants to secure a €100 000 global grant from Nature Research and Yakult to determine how gut bacteria affect medications for depression and anxiety.

‘Microbiota' refers to the trillions of microbes, comprising of 700–1000 different bacterial species reside in the gut, whereas ‘microbiome' refers to the collective genomes of these microbes.