You might be wondering what constipation has to do with long-term brain health. The answer lies in the microbiome-gut-brain axis hypothesis, which was first described as early as the 1930s.
This hypothesis states that there is a bidirectional relationship between the central nervous system, which involves the brain, and the enteric nervous system, which is the part of the nervous system that lives in the gut. It postulates that there’s a link between cognition and emotion (aka, what your brain is up to) and what’s going on in the intestines (aka, what your gut is up to).
This is far from the first study to establish this connection. Other studies have shown that there’s a link between anxiety and gut health, inflammatory bowel disease and dementia2, and cognitive decline and microbiome alterations3. In other words, this is just another piece of evidence that the microbiome-gut-brain axis hypothesis is true and that it affects our health on a daily basis.