Fecal therapy for the brain

Fecal transplantation reversed brain aging in mice

Marina Astvatsaturyan, Echo of Moscow

Brain functions slow down as the body ages. A new study shows that transplanting intestinal microbes in the form of feces from young mice to old ones can turn back the clock of an aging brain.

The bacteria in our intestinal tract affect everything from the mood we wake up with to our overall health.

The totality of these bacteria, called the gut microbiome, changes over the course of life, and therefore scientists wondered whether the rejuvenation of the microbiome, that is, replacing it with bacteria characteristic of a young age, could affect the age-related changes in the body. To test this idea, they took fecal samples from three- to four-month-old mice and transplanted them into 20-month-old mice, which by rodent standards are already very old.

Transplantation into the intestine was performed through a special tube twice a week for two months. As a control, old mice were transplanted with material from old mice, and young mice from young ones. The first thing that the experimenters noticed was the rejuvenation of the gut microbiome itself in old mice who received a transplant from young mice: it became the same as in donors, for example, Enterococcus began to prevail in it, as in young mice. But changes have also occurred with the brain. The hippocampus of old mice–the part of the brain involved in learning and memory–became physically and chemically similar to the hippocampus of young mice.

Moreover, old mice who received a fecal transplant of a young mouse got out of the maze faster and remembered his plan better, as shown by subsequent exit attempts. The results of these experiments scientists from University College Cork in Ireland was published in the journal Nature Aging (Boehme et al. Microbiota from young mice counteracts selective age-associated behavioral deficits). None of the described effects were observed in elderly mice who received a fecal transplant from donors of the same age.

However, after fecal transplantation to old mice, something remained unchanged from the young ones. So, the old mice did not become more social, which surprised the head of the study, John Cryan, who in other animal experiments noticed the influence of the microbiome on social interactions. According to Sean Gibbons from the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, quoted in the journal Science in a note with the hooligan headline New poo, new you? Fecal transplants reverse signs of brain aging in mice, the area of fecal transplantation in mice remains ambiguous. While some studies point to the benefits of this procedure, there is at least one in which it is found that it leads to a decrease in cognitive abilities.

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