We already know that germs from healthy individuals can be used to treat people with digestive problems caused by the loss of their own gut bacteria, and there are a number of studies showing that worms (helminths) living in the intestines, actually can make the symptoms of ulcerative colitis and Chron’s disease disappear.
With this knowledge in mind, researchers at Duke Medicine in Durham, North Carolina, hypothesized that if they loaded the digestive systems of laboratory rats with bacteria and worms, under controlled laboratory conditions, they would observe a suppression of the immune systems. They further hypothesized the treated immune systems would not fight infections effectively.
Well, the results of the study were perhaps, not so surprising because the hypothesis was proven to be wrong. The researchers found that with increased biodiversity in the guts of the laboratory rats came a marked increase in the immune response. The research also points to just how complex the environment of the digestive tract can be.
“We were surprised – we thought enhancing biodiversity would make the animals more immune-suppressed,” said senior author William Parker, Ph.D., associate professor of surgery at Duke. “But it appears that at the same time we enhanced the biodiversity in a way that should suppress allergy and auto-immunity, we also enhanced the immune response to a variety of stimuli.”
The study highlights just how clean our environments may be, and this may be detrimental to our overall health. We are constantly bombarded with advertisements for cleaning products and wipes that kill 99.9 percent of household germs, when maybe we need some of those germs to help the immune system work properly.
“In our clean environment, rats and by extension humans, are not doing well,” Parker said. “We are potentially seeing a decreased ability to respond to dangerous antigens while, at the same time, we respond to things that we shouldn’t, causing allergies and autoimmune problems. This work demonstrates we all may really need better biodiversity, and perhaps that biodiversity needs to be artificially introduced back in the system.”
This study was published online in the journal PLOS ONE on April 8, 2015 under the title: “Increased Biodiversity in the Environment Improves the Humoral Response of Rats”
