CLAS Acts February 2021
Monthly newsletter of the TT Faculty of CLAS
Eating Our Cake and Feeling It Too—A discussion of the gut/brain relationship with Elizabeth Flandreau
Psychology Assistant Professor Elizabeth Flandreau grew up in a small Wisconsin rural town and didn’t have much in the way of plans after college. She’d studied biology as an undergrad and credits a series of women mentors and advisors with helping her think through her future plans in a medical field. Classes of interest in areas such as neuroscience and mental illness appealed to her because of some of her own experiences. That interest became more refined to how hormones and the immune system relate to mental illness.
Elizabeth attended graduate school in Neuroscience at Emery University in Atlanta because it was strong in this field. Her advisor was the Psychiatry Department chair and she found it challenging to achieve success in a less-than supportive environment. One advisor did prove more engaging and helped Elizabeth design an experiment to manipulate gene expression in adult animals. They determined the best method was through the use of lentiviral vectors.[i] Elizabeth hypothesized that using lentiviral vectors to increase gene expression of a neuropeptide involved in stress would lead to changes in behavior akin to depression and anxiety in humans. This neuropeptide was suspected of playing a role in mental illness such as major depressive disorder because people with that condition show elevated levels in their brains.
“I wanted to look at how these peptides in one part of the brain influence other parts of the brain. The amygdala in particular is thought to play a role in the behavioral signs of stress and the hypothalamus is most important in the process that results in cortisol production. That’s one of the links between metabolism and brain health,” Elizabeth explains.
Cortisol does help us with using our energy stores in order to deal with environmental stress (such as running away from a lion by providing energy to our muscles), but that prioritizing also means that more non-acute things we need are not prioritized. There’s the rub.
While it is good to have some stress and respond to it (we benefit from responding to controllable stressors), the problem is that unpredictable, uncontrollable, chronic stress or traumatic events push our stress response out of homeostasis.[ii]
“That starts a chain of events that could produce depression, PTSD and other mental illness. Homeostasis is like your thermostat. Allostatic load is like not being able to get back to 70 degrees. The situation rachets up becoming more abnormal. A lot of people with depression have elevated cortisol in their blood—a very consistent finding. In fact, one of the only consistent findings. PTSD is a little different and tends to be associated with lower levels in the blood, but the problem is still the set point going wrong on the HPA Axis[iii].”
While our endocrine responses do a lot of good for our response to stress, there is a time and place for these responses. For instance, in PTSD there is hypervigilance and experiencing fear to ward us of danger and these are important in a war zone, but upon returning home to relative safety, it may be hard to turn these responses by the brain off.
“Really hard,” Elizabeth notes.
“We know there is brain-gut communication for neuronal and hormonal signals—all of them do more than just one thing. Peripheral hormones in the body do other stuff in the brain as neurotransmitters. Those hormones responsible for feeding behavior talk to the reward centers. Eating feels good, which makes sense evolutionarily. If we aren’t food insecure, that can backfire and can be unhealthy for body and brain. Sugar craving could have motivated picking berries long ago, but in 2021, we might bake a cake and eat it.”
This also connects to our response to stress—you wouldn’t snack while the lion is chasing you. But if you have been chased in the past, you might store up in anticipation of a stressor like that.
Elizabeth recognizes that research in this area is hard to design. She works with experimental animals looking at interactions between stress and diet. There are a lot of variables to consider: the duration of the diet, whether the animals have any choices between diets, whether the “unhealthy” diet is administered during developmental critical periods like adolescence, and the timing of diet administration and stress exposure.
“It might protect them from stress to come home from a bad day and have a tasty snack. But a longer-term an unhealthy diet that causes weight gain would be a different scenario,” Elizabeth acknowledges.
Other researchers studying the effects of diet in experimental animals have focused on high fat diet, but used a high sugar diet as the control group, introducing a big problem when it comes to interpreting the results of these.
“I’m trying to compare an actual control diet for rodents so that we can get at brain-gut communication and mental illness without extraneous factors getting in the way. I’m looking for a collaborator interested in the same types of things with expertise in the body because I’m a mouse brain person. Help with the peripheral end of the brain/gut connection would be welcome.”
Her website profile page also invites student expressions of interest in the research to work on summer projects, although her lab is currently on pause due to the pandemic.
Elizabeth applies her expertise in stress to her interactions with students. “During the pandemic, my teaching has focused on the predictable vs. unpredictable stress. I’ve tried not to create uncontrollable stress for my students. I’ve put GVSU communications through the filter of what will happen in my course in order to leave them with less to figure out. I’ve also encouraged them to take care of themselves while they are waiting for additional information. I told my students up front what the plan was for any circumstances that mighty come up. I also wrote to my advisees to suggest how to build schedules for this term that take into consideration the demands of online courses.”
She was conscious that many of our students are also essential and even front-line workers. She coached her students to establish a routine schedule to help them know what is happening on a given day—something that helps in the face of uncontrollable stress.
From both the perspectives of life and teaching, Elizabeth wants to reduce harmful kinds of stress. She wants us to have a strong immune system.
“I learned about myself that I’d get sick at exam time when I was in school. These were opportunistic infections due to lowered immune system effectiveness due to stress.” Other research has shown that stress can blunt the immune response to a vaccine, making it less effective, so lowering our collective stress level truly is life or death.
In the last year, Elizabeth has learned more about stress than anyone should ever have to. “I went on maternity leave that became bereavement leave,” she confides. Returning to work in Winter 2020, she found it hard to bear the petty complaints of others. “I was more in life and death mode. The Pandemic, oddly enough, made the process easier—there was less difference between what I was going through with the loss of my daughter, Georgia, and what those around me were experiencing.”
“My research is currently shut down. I was going to write an NIH grant, but making plans in 2020…” Elizabeth knows there is no need to finish that sentence. And yet, she goes on to proudly say that she donated her lab’s PPE to Spectrum and to say that when her lab can resume that collaboration will be the way forward to serve all the student who want the research experience and to have quality interactions between labs. This psychoneuroimmunologist has plans.
[i] Wikipedia may be of help to some of us here: “Lentiviral vectors in gene therapy is a method by which genes can be inserted, modified, or deleted in organisms using lentivirus. Lentiviruses are a family of viruses that are responsible for notable diseases like AIDS, which infect by inserting DNA into their host cells' genome.”
[ii] We can all be pardoned for thinking that the pandemic is therefore pushing most of us out of homeostasis.
[iii] The Hypothalamus-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis is our primary hormonal response to s
A Note from Dean Drake
Nineteenth-century writer Helen Hunt Jackson, friend of Emily Dickinson and early Anglo advocate for Native American rights, wrote a poem called “February.” Here is an excerpt:
These are the days when ancients held a rite
Of expiation for the old year's ill,
And prayer to purify the new year's will:
Fit days,—ere yet the spring rains blur the sight,
Ere yet the bounding blood grows hot with haste
And dreaming thoughts grow heavy with a greed
The ardent summer's joy to have and taste:
Fit days—to take to last year's losses heed,
To reckon clear the new life's sterner need…
While I am enjoying winter’s beauty very much, I also feel the yearning for summer’s light and freedom that Hunt expresses and can’t wait for post-vaccination “fit days.” As February begins, we can begin to look forward with optimism through participating in robust processes of collaborative action: the CLAS governance elections, as well as college and university visioning toward our next strategic plan. I anticipate the work ahead with pleasure.
I want to thank you (again!) for all you are doing to help our students and each other stay connected. As our feature article illustrates, the stress we are experiencing is real, and its effects are undeniable. As our CLAS Student Advisory Committee recently reminded us, your words and actions make a real difference in students’ lives. Your words and actions also make a difference in the world—some of you have been thinking deeply about equity and reimaging better systems, some have devised ways to hold up those bearing the greatest burden of this disease, some have made pedagogical discoveries while using new technologies, some have focused loving attention on home and family. We are all changing and growing, learning more about what matters.
With appreciation for you and your work,
Jen