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What If Something Else Lives in Your Brain? The Science and Secrets of Brain Microbiome
What it is and why it matters
What if there are unseen inhabitants within your brain?
In 2020, I wrote an article titled “Is There A Brain Microbiome Now?” to delve into this question. I described preliminary findings in 2018 when scientists captured images of microscopic rod-like structures — likely bacterial — in human brain samples preserved shortly after death. This shocked the scientific community, as the brain is believed to be a sterile organ.
Four years later, this topic crossed my mind again. I wondered why I hadn’t heard about it from the popular media or academia. Curious, I searched PubMed — the leading biomedical literature database — about the brain microbiome. The search returned 36 papers as of 14 May 2024, which is very few compared to, say, the gut microbiome, with over 20,000 papers. No wonder I hadn’t heard about the brain microbiome.
Of the 36 papers, 26 are about the gut-brain axis. This axis refers to the influence of the gut microbiome on the brain, which does not involve any brain microbiome. This leaves only 10 or fewer relevant papers, and reading them has been very interesting. So, let me tell you about the science and secrets of the fascinating brain microbiome.
