Some good news this week for folks who have GERD, or chronic acid reflux, they discovered the cause: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2016/05/17/researchers-discove...
About 90% of the neurotransmitter serotonin in your body is produced by enterochromaffin cells in the stomach.
Though this does not directly affect the brain (the brain has it's own serotonine synthesis) it modulates a multitude of responses like blood pressure, body temperature, which, in turn, affect the mood.
Quote from Wikipedia:
Serotonin is a neurotransmitter and is found in all bilateral animals, where it mediates gut movements and the animal's perceptions of resource availability. [citation needed]
In less complex animals, such as some invertebrates, resources simply mean food availability.
In more complex animals, such as arthropods and vertebrates, resources also can mean social dominance. In response to the perceived abundance or scarcity of resources, an animal's growth, reproduction or mood may be elevated or lowered. This may somewhat depend on how much serotonin the organism has at its disposal.
Cytokines are, generally, cell signalling molecules. In the case of GERD, if I understand the process correctly, these cytokines are instructing the tissue of the esophagus, and associated immune system cells, to initiate the inflammatory response.
Inflammatory responses in mucosal tissues typically include an increase in mucous production, which is the body's attempt to protect the tissue from the refluxed stomach acid.
So it follows that the first tissue changes you should expect to see are inflammation and increase mucous production as the body tries to protect itself from exposure to stomach acid.
This doesn't mean the cytokines cause the inflammation, nor that they cause acid reflux, they're just the cell signalling molecule that initiates the inflammatory response, released in response to increased acidity on the tissue surfaces, released long before gross changes occur as a result of acid damage.
If we give medicines to dampen the cytokine release, or dampen the inflammatory response to the cytokines, thereby reducing the inflammation, that doesn't mean the tissue won't be damaged by the acid reflux - if anything, down-regulating the normal inflammatory immune response will worsen the damage caused by the acid.
The question is: what is causing the acid reflux?
That is, both A and B can be said to cause C, in the standard counterfactual sense of the word "cause": if you hold everything but X constant, and add more X, and more Y occurs, then X causes Y.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't do B. If Q is worse than C, it's still a good choice. But it does cause C.
http://www.amazon.com/Second-Brain-Groundbreaking-Understand...
That is amazing news!.