Exciting clinical work on depression

Ms. Caroline Wallace, a PhD candidate in Clinical Neuroscience at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, has presented her work and study at the meeting of the Sociedad Espanola de Microbiota, Probioticos Y Prebioticos (SEPYP) taking place in Granada, Spain, from February 12 to 14, 2020.

Ms. Wallace’s presentation “Bridging the Gap between Nutrition and Psychiatry Using Probiotics” examines the effects of probiotics supplements on symptoms of depression employing a combination of Lactobacillus helveticus Rosell®-52 and Bifidobacterium longum Rosell®-175, developed by Lallemand Health Solutions. She summarized the research on probiotics and depression to date, including preliminary results from a pilot clinical trial showing the effects of probiotic supplements on symptoms of depression, which has paved the way for a large-scale on-going clinical study (for other use than food/dietary food supplements). She examined theories for mechanisms that may be underlying these effects and discuss how this research fits into the framework of the field of nutritional psychiatry.

Depression is a complex psychiatric disorder difficult to treat using classic antidepressant medication, mainly due to inconsistent responses to treatments from one patient to another. Ms. Wallace is a member of the Canadian Biomarker Integration Network in Depression (CAN-BIND), a national program of research and learning, she is working to find newer and more efficient ways to alleviate symptoms of depression. One of these innovative solutions may reside in the brain-gut axis. Therefore, her research focus in this emerging field is to examine the neurobiological relationship between nutrition and mental health to develop novel treatments for depression, as well as searching for biomarkers that will help predict who will respond to these treatments.