The brain has its own microbiome

So, something is weird here, just want to invade this thread and ask HN if there should be a change.

I literally have no idea why someone would downvote this comment. But someone did. This does not bother my ego, it bothers my sensibilities.

So, maybe we should not allow downvotes unless someone comments on why they thing the comment is negative. No need to do this for upvotes because there is no need to comment on things you agree with.

Downvoting without commenting leads to suppression without justification which can be bias or outright manipulation.

Or maybe the up and downvotes are the problem?

Hey!

Reminds me a bit of myself. After 2 COVID infections and 3 vaccines, I began experiencing digestive problems, sleep disturbance, fatigue and severe brain fog. I also was often dismissed by the doctors as simply being depressed. But I now know that I have long COVID. The fight against it is still ongoing and you can read about my struggle with it here: https://tunn3l.pro.

I'm currently working with my girlfriend on a sticker campaign to educate people on these illnesses (esp. me/cfs) in order to remove the Stigmatisation that many patients with similar symptoms expierience.

Because these microbes are better educated?

Looks like they are using molecular methods on post-mortem brains - all sorts of bugs can grow post-mortem and molecular methods can give false-positives as well as detect non-viable microbes, etc. But that's also based on a quick skim / haven't read the full paper yet.

Culturing from CSF in general will depend on the concentration of the microbe, whether they are viable, if antibiotics/antivirals were already initiated pre-collection, whether it's plated on the appropriate media (e.g. a rare microbe that only grows on one specific type of agar plate), etc. Culturing viruses is also hard/many hospital micro labs have moved away from that.

I think this study may suggest that we are failing to detect certain brain infections (and many are notoriously hard to diagnose if you don't catch them in the right window of time). But a brain microbiome sounds far-fetched. We even plate from brain tissue directly at times and aren't growing a bunch of organisms. I'd approach that claim with a healthy dose of skepticism.

We can take it one step further: There are microbes everywhere in your body, they matter and they do things. When you take them away or fuck with them too much, weird things start happening.

It is I think not a particularly surprising take. But then often it can be valuable to have things that are kind of obvious codified into a paper of some sort so that we no longer have to rely on "but isn't that obvious?" and can instead point to some primary source that actually explains what is true. That way it can be true for everyone, even the people for whom it wasn't already obvious.

I’ve got a gut feeling that we will. A gut feeling in my brain.

Of course. Gut microbes to blood via leaky gut, small enough blood microbes to brain via BBB.

They used to, but then they built the vagus nerve

Not quite what you asked, but I know of why another really common set of micro organisms wasn’t noticed. Megaviruses, which rival bacteria in size, were only discovered in the last couple of decades. They’re everywhere. But when people would look for viruses they’d do so specifically by sorting matter in samples by size. So effectively by definition a virus would have to be small. We’d been looking at them under microscopes for over a hundred years but assumed they were inert particles.

I'm sure there are many other things still unknown and many things known but may change. Science is about discovery and many new discoveries are made even basic but also complex discoveries. Information known can change when new information is discovered. Science is not carved in stone it's not faith and corrections, updates are welcome part of discovery.

Archive.is is only showing the beginning of the article, too, unfortunately: https://archive.is/XW6H0

its new scientist I wouldn't worry about it. A number of times I've seen articles then looked at the source, they can be fairly exaggerated.

NFT bacteria?

It does feel like every organ system and every disease has at least one research group trying to connect it to the microbiome. It's reminiscent of the hype cycle around oxidative stress and antioxidants 20 uears ago. There was a core of solid science there, but in terms of connecting specific diseases to oxidative stress, it seems like the research community has largely moved on.

There is one with the AI and gut bacteria combination: https://www.linkedin.com/company/anibiome/ They recently raised series A.

> Ani Biome uses machine learning models to provide personalized solutions for enhancing gut microbiome function and addressing inflammation, a prevalent factor in age-related chronic ailments.

But they are missing the blockchain component :)

If you were a nonprofit medical service or a for-profit insurance company, you could do AI analysis of gut microbiome eDNA against electronic health records with potential for significant value if you could get a stool sample every so often.

What's the synergy between blockchain and the others in this scenario?