In this blog post, Teresa Badillo explains why psychobiotics, which have the potential to regulate many of the neurotransmitters that affect emotions and mental-health functioning, may be helpful for those with mood disorders.

How often do we hear parents express their frustration of living with their moody teenage children? Anyone living with or working with teenagers can certainly identify. Parents learn to endure the rollercoaster ride knowing that eventually their teen will reach a more mature age and develop stability. But what if that doesn’t happen?

Today, the normal, neurotypical teenager:

• Struggles with having the ability to cope with unstable emotions
• Lacks the capacity to make good, sound decisions
• Does not have mind over matter
• Does not have the skillset to have good coping mechanisms
• May not be capable of self-soothing and self-regulation

It seems that everyone today, in every walk of life, struggles with mood issues. Just living and existing in our world of constant stress and anxiety makes it very difficult to regulate our mood and therefore, our nervous systems are often in the sympathetic-dominant, fight-or-flight mode instead of a more peaceful and relaxed rest-and-digest, parasympathetic mode. Navigating our stressful world with high anxiety only leads to emotional instability and more erratic mood swings.

Mood and the Vagus Nerve

What causes mood swings, mood disorders and mental health issues and why are these issues so prevalent today? According to Dr. Stephen Porges, the father of Polyvagal Theory, in his concept of neuroception, we are all in trauma mode as the body scans our environment for cues of safety or danger. According to Dr. Porges, not only does the body remember a traumatic experience, but it can get stuck in the trauma response and freezes. Mood regulation requires emotional stability. How do we regulate our emotions when we are living in fight or flight, constant fear, anxiety, stress, depression and trauma? How do we develop greater resiliency or learn to have better coping mechanisms to survive everyday living in our world today.

We don’t need to look very far. Many neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorders (ASD), Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease all struggle with mood regulation. Research has finally understood that when the gut is not healthy, the brain is dramatically affected. We cannot begin to understand our mental-health functioning if we don’t look at how the body and brain work together simultaneously to function as one. One is not working without the other. Mood regulation is, therefore, dependent on both these two powerful forces: the brain and the body.

Let’s start with gut function. The vagus nerve, which is the transporter of gut bacteria to the brain from the gut, will be compromised and not function well under certain circumstances:

• Gastrointestinal inflammation
• Systemic Candida
• Parasites, viruses, bacteria
• Mycotoxins and biotoxins

All these conditions cause reduced vagus-nerve functioning and ultimately contribute to many mental health symptoms such as anxiety, depression and poor cognition.

Mood and the Microbiome

Mood is 100% dependent on a healthy microbiome. The microbiome is dependent on:

• A diverse diet rich in fiber from whole grains, fruits and vegetables
• High amounts of prebiotic-containing foods such as onions, lettuce, cabbage, apples, bananas
• Lots of good quality protein
• Fermented foods such as sauerkraut, kefir and kombucha

These foods, coupled with a strongly functioning vagus nerve, create a healthy gut-brain axis. This combination has a powerful positive effect on mood, behaviors, anxiety and depression. This outcome has led many mental health researchers to focus and do more neuroscience research in probiotics and certain strains of probiotics that can affect the gut microbiome-to-brain axis, with the intention of finding better viable solutions to ameliorate symptoms of mental health.

The autism community has been well versed in the gut-brain connection since the early 1990s, when autism rates were beginning to escalate in the United States and Canada. Parents of children with autism knew how important gut microbiome challenges were in maintaining a clean, healthy gut so that their children could reach their developmental milestones that they missed due to the onset of regressive autism under the age of three.

Dopamine and Serotonin

Two of the main issues for children with autism are gut dysbiosis and brain-chemistry imbalances in the neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine, both of which have a profound effect on mood. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that affects learning, memory, happiness as well as regulating body temperature, sleep, sexual behavior and hunger. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter affecting feelings of pleasure, satisfaction and motivation as well as controlling memory, sleep, learning, concentration and movement. Both neurotransmitters have a significant impact on brain function and mood.

For a child’s brain to function appropriately, a child needs to reach his or her developmental milestones in the normal timeframe. Many children with regressive autism experienced excessive toxicity either in the womb, at birth and/or before the age of three, causing their development to regress back in time to under one year of age and compromising their ability to reach their developmental milestones. Once neurodevelopment has regressed or been interrupted, it is very complicated and very specific to each child to regain their neurological functioning and their developmental milestones. It is difficult, but not impossible.

Psychobiotics

Giving these children specific strains of probiotics can have a beneficial effect on their gut microbiomes, which in turn can have a very powerful effect on their mood. A child with autism not treated biomedically will exhibit lots of inappropriate and maladaptive behaviors such as continual meltdowns, so the first place to start may be with the gut by giving the child specific probiotics and/or probiotic foods.

Today, researchers are looking at how probiotics and their long-term usage affect the central nervous system and the gastrointestinal system, and how they can improve mood swings, anxiety and depression in a person. Around 2013, the term “psychobiotics” came about due to some specific types of probiotics that had the potential of improving psychiatric symptoms.

Many mental health researchers (see Sources & References, below) became interested in specific probiotics with one or two strains of Lactobacillus or Bifidobacterium for their potential to be psychobiotics. These psychobiotics can regulate neurotransmitters such as GABA, serotonin, dopamine, glutamate and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) that affect emotions and mental-health functioning. The bottom line for many professionals is that it is far healthier, safer and potentially just as effective to use psychobiotics as the first choice instead of SSRI drugs that may have potentially negative side effects. The key factor is that these neurotransmitters play important roles in controlling the neural excitatory-inhibitory balance (GABA/glutamate balance), mood, cognitive functions, learning and memory processes. Now psychobiotics have become a potentially viable option.

Researchers also found that psychobiotics also improve the function of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA), which is the way our body responds to and deals with stress. Psychobiotics were also reported to inhibit inflammation and decrease cortisol levels, improve bowel motility, maintain gut lining integrity, encourage microbiome diversity and other contributing factors to successfully reduce symptoms of mood, anxiety and depression.

Neuralli

Recently, a new and potentially very effective psychobiotic has become available called Neuralli, which has been specifically designed for challenges such as autism spectrum disorders ASD, ADHD and Parkinson’s disease. Neuralli contains two clinically tested strains that influence the brain from the gut microbiome:

• Heat-treated Lactobacillus paracasei PS23 (HT-PS23) postbiotic
• Lactobacillus plantarum PS128 probiotic

Neuralli can potentially provide important benefits to children with autism. Many autism parents have reported improvements in:

• A more positive outlook on life
• Less anxiety
• Fewer meltdowns
• Improved ability to handle stress
• Improved socialization
• Increased motivation

Neuralli is providing the opportunity for many adults with ASD to improve their mood and stay consistent all day long. This opens the door for many possibilities with this population such as being able to maintain a job, living in a community, being able to function appropriately, needing less intervention, needing less drugs and so on. These adults can function throughout the day without experiencing the debilitating mood swings that negatively affect themselves, their loved ones and prohibit community participation because of too much aggression and even possible violence.

A psychobiotic such as Neuralli could be a positive solution for many families with older sons and daughters with ASD who need to keep a consistent happy mood to have better quality of life, maintain a job, keep a placement, live in the community and experience higher cognitive functioning at any age. It is possible.

About Teresa Badillo

She won a court case in 1995 against the Rockland County School District in New York to enable ARC Prime Time for Kids to be the first school using Applied Behavioral Analysis teaching method for autism that was paid for by the Rockland County School District. The following year she was instrumental in getting the New York Minister of Education to approve an extension of the ARC license from 5 to 21 years.

She has worked over the years in a number of alternative medical practices with doctors and practitioners organizing various biomedical intervention options for children with autism. Since the mid 1990s, Teresa has served on several boards:

• Foundation for Children with Developmental Disabilities
• The Autoimmunity Project
• Developmental Delayed Resources
• Epidemic Answers

She continues to consult and advise parents on all different areas of autism especially nutritional protocols. Since 2006 she has worked with NutraOrgana, LLC and BioCellular Analysis Testing. She currently researches, writes the newsletter and blogs Teresa’s Corner for The Autism Exchange (AEX). She also writes blog posts and pages for Documenting Hope.

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