At Live Science Rachael Rettner has an article presenting the evidence that chronic fatigue syndrome is caused by an imbalance in gut bacteria:
People with chronic fatigue syndrome may have imbalances in their gut bacteria, a new study suggests.
The study found that people with chronic fatigue syndrome had higher levels of certain gut bacteria and lower levels of others compared to healthy people who didn’t have the condition.
The researchers then checked to see if these imbalances also characterized the subset of patients in the study who had irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), an intestinal disorder that is common in people with chronic fatigue syndrome. Results showed that patients did indeed have different patterns of gut bacteria disturbances depending on whether they had only chronic fatigue syndrome or both chronic fatigue syndrome and IBS.
There’s a lengthy list of conditions including chronic fatigue, irritable bowel syndrome, and fibromyalgia in which the patients experience more than one and possibly all of the symptoms for all of the conditions, there are no clinical signs, and the diagnosis frequently depends on what the patient is complaining of. If the patient complains about fatigue, he is diagnosed with CFS. If the patient complains of abdominal distress, she is diagnosed with IBS. And if the patient complains of pain, he or she is diagnosed with fibromyalgia. Despite the patient actually experiencing fatigue, abdominal distress, and pain.
In the 1940s through the 1950s Baby Boomers were given enormous doses of antibiotics. Just about any time they were sick they were given antibiotics. Under the circumstances what would be surprising is if they hadn’t experienced an upset in the balance of their intestinal flora.
Lately I’m seeing everything from obesity to Parkinson’s Disease being blamed on gut bacteria. Although that’s an improvement over blaming disease on sin (malingering, overeating, eating the wrong thing, etc.), there’s a risk of gut bacteria becoming the explanation du jour. The balance is probably somewhere in the middle.
Probably the latest fad. Now that we are doing transplants of flora, i.e. we have a treatment, we need to look for more things to treat. Hope some of it pans out, but I am skeptical.
Steve
That’s kind of what I think as well. I suspect there are some conditions where it’s an appropriate therapy but a lot more knowledge will be required before we have a complete picture. Meanwhile, there will be a lot of useless fecal transplants.
Well it does seem to be a plausible missing link in the understanding of mind-body connection and epigenetics. I have a lot of hope for research leading to better understanding of mental illnesses and those psychosomatic ailments you listed deriving from studies on nutrition (micronutrients) and the gut biome.
Psychiatry is still in the Dark Ages, with drug companies tinkering with molecules to get new patents all based on the same mechanisms like reuptake inhibitors for neurotransmitters. The doctors draw from this pool of drugs using trial and error hoping for remission of symptoms even though the side effect profile can be horrendous (“Do no harm?”)
The faddishness of research is a given in our system and may lead to overallocation of resources but worth risking it in this area, IMO.
I may be wrong about this but my intuition is that 90-99% of the medical research done in this country is by physicians prescribing stuff for off-label use by their patients. It isn’t organized, systematic, or scientific and they probably don’t even look at it as research.
That’s certainly true in veterinary medicine. I think because it’s more acceptable to use drugs off label (and a lot less litigation of course), the research often does eventually get done when the universities see trend. It’s not a bad system really although it does rely a lot on clinician judgement.