No chiropractor – or any other wellness provider for that matter – can deny the fact that stress is probably the single greatest deterrent to good health and long life. Ample research has been done to show that chronic stress (and even some incidents of short-term acute stress) can affect nearly every system in the body and suppress cellular immunity.
Last year, a study found that stress can also wreak havoc on the trillions of bacteria that work and thrive inside the digestive system – bacteria which play a significant role in triggering the innate immune system to stay slightly active, and thereby prepared to quickly spring into action in the face of an infection.
“Since graduate school, I’ve been interested in how stress affects the bacteria naturally in our bodies,” explained Michael Bailey, an assistant professor of dentistry and member of the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research at Ohio State University. “Even though we’ve known that stress changes these bacteria, we didn’t really understand what that meant or if there was any sort of biological function associated with effects on these bacteria.”
The new study appeared in the journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity.
Bailey and colleagues turned to mice to better understand the roles that bacteria play in immune balance. They ran a series of experiments using a common stressor for these animals. For two hours daily for six days, an aggressive mouse was placed in a cage of a group of more docile mice.
At the end of the string of experiments, blood samples were taken from both stressed animals and matched mice from a control group, along with samples of material from inside each animal’s intestine. The blood samples were analyzed to detect the levels of two biomarkers used to gauge stress: a cytokine called interleukin-6 (IL-6) and a protein called MCP-1 that summons macrophages, or scavenger cells, to the site of an infection.
From the intestinal samples, Bailey’s team could determine the relative proportion of at least 30 types of bacteria residing there.
Compared to the control mice, the stressed animals showed two marked differences: The proportion of one important type of bacteria in the gut – Bacteroides – fell by 20-25% while another type – Clostridium – increased a similar amount. Also, levels of the two biomarkers, IL-6 and MCP-1, jumped 10-fold in the stressed mice, compared to controls.
The researchers then treated stressed mice with broad-spectrum antibiotics that could kill as much as 90% of the intestinal bacteria for a short period. When they again looked at the two immune biomarkers in the stressed mice, they saw only a doubling of IL-6 and MCP-1 – an increase only one-fifth as much.
“We know now that if we knock the population of bacteria down with antibiotics, we don’t have the same innate immune response,” Bailey said. “That showed that the bacteria are involved in the ability of stress to prime the innate immune system.”
He said that the research shows that some of the changes in systemic immunity in the body can be influenced by changes in these bacterial colonies, a result that reinforces the idea that they have a broader effect on the immune response.
The next step, the researchers say, is to better understand the roles that the bacteria play in activating the immune system, and to determine if other factors are playing a key role in the process.
For the medical community, that step will likely involve the development of new drugs but for chiropractors and other wellness providers the next step is (as always) to get to the root of the problem: addressing the stress itself and the subluxations caused by that stress. Regular adjustments – along with patient education and other wellness approaches like massage, yoga, and meditation – will go a long way to helping patients reduce the physical, mental and emotional stress that impacts so negatively on their health. By making sure we provide that education and access to the proper care, we’ll help them avoid the use of drugs that can exacerbate the problem.
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FYI:
To learn about a new online assessment tool that can measure stress along with other indicators of wellness, visit IOMwellness.com. IOM is helping doctors around the country attract new patients, evaluate their total well-being, and perform accurate outcome measurements. It’s been endorsed by leading chiropractic coaches, including Drs. Dennis Nikitow (Certainty Practice), CJ Mertz (Full Potential Leadership), Jason Lord (Housecall), Mike Reid (Chiropractic Masters), Tedd Koren (Koren Publications), Kevin Pallis and Ed Plentz (The New Renaissance), and many others.