In a new study, UCLA Health researchers have found that people who experienced discrimination had pro-inflammatory bacteria and gene activity in their gut microbiome that was different from those who did not experience discrimination. The researchers could also predict with 91% accuracy which study participants faced discrimination by only analyzing their gut microbiome using stool samples. Aparna Church, Ph.
D., co-director of the UCLA Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center and co-lead author, said researchers tend to study the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis, which is the body's stress management system, to gauge how discrimination affects the body. But she and Dr.
Tien Dong, an assistant professor of gastroenterology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and co-lead author, were interested in how discrimination affects the brain-gut axis. "There's a lot of research on how discrimination affects the HPA axis and how that leads to disease, but that's only one part of the story," Dong said. Their previous work found that discrimination led to an increase in the emotional arousal regions of the brain.
Building upon those findings, Church and Dong wanted to dig deeper and study the gene activity and composition linked to discrimination in the gut microbiome . The researchers surveyed 154 Asian, Black, Hispanic, and white male and female adults about their everyday discrimination—including gender-, race-, or religion-based discrimination—and their psychological h.
