What happens in our gut has a profound impact on the function of our brain. How clearly we think, the stability of our mood and our capacity to remember are significantly influenced by the balance of germs in our gut. A salubrious community of microbes seed brain chemicals that have a positive effect on our emotions, help us to consolidate our memories, promote brain chemistry that preserves the integrity of our higher processes and shields our brain from the damaging effects of toxins and inflammatory molecules.
Ageing can witness a disruption in this healthy ecosystem which can set us up for a harrowing decline in our neurocognitive processes sadly culminating in the onset of dementia. Surgery and anaesthesia, together with the antibiotics and other medications received before, during and after an operation, can similarly compromise this balance. Bacteria and inflammatory operators, normally barred from entry to our brains now have easy access where they incite the activation of further inflammatory insurgents igniting a fire which surges to a raging inferno. We call this firestorm neuroinflammation, unhinging our capacity to think and remember, impaired cognitive function, which can persist long after the operation is over.
But there might be a way to reverse the temporary disruption to this nurturing symbiosis, which might also go some way to preventing cognitive decline that accelerates as we get older. Recent research has suggested that supplementing with probiotics, the so-called healthy bacteria, including Bifidobacterium longum, Lactobacillus acidophilus and Enterococcus faecalis, substantially decreased the incidence of diminished cognitive function in those who took this combination around the time they had surgery.
It has also been shown that stroke victims have better outcomes when they are given probiotics. Alzheimer’s sufferers also had improved cognitive function with a mix of these beneficial bacteria.
Probiotics might not be a panacea for all that goes wrong with our brains as we age but they might help us to negotiate surgery with our higher powers intact and research might even come to demonstrate that they are one of the many strategies that we can adopt to combat and even prevent the development of dementia.
