Core Concept #2 | The Autonomic Nervous System
The 2nd core concept is about your nervous system.
Chronic digestive disorders are affected by psycho-social factors as well as dysregulation of the nervous system. This video outlines the key concepts to understand these factors & breaks them down into understandable chunks.
Summary:
After you’ve done all the typical medical approaches & you want to do more to heal it makes sense to explore the bigger picture. Chronic medical disorders are often complicated puzzles that are much more than just our organs or tissues. The nervous system is like the Kevin Bacon of the body. Everything is connected to it one way or another so it makes it both a practical and also smaller, more manageable target to focus on.
Dysregulation in the gut-brain connection can often be part of the puzzle of healing a chronic GI condition. In order to understand & begin to address gut-brain dysregulation it’s helpful to understand these key terms outlined below:
Autonomic Nervous System (ANS)
The ANS regulates lots of processes in the body that are involuntary & automatic. Things like your breathing, heartbeat & digestion. They just happen in the background to keep you alive. The ANS is made of three parts that all work together in a dance to keep all the systems of your body working smoothly. One key part is the Enteric Nervous System
Enteric Nervous System
The digestive tract has an enormous amount of nerves within it to the point that it’s considered its own separate branch of the NS. This is the famous “ second brain in your gut”.
Autonomic Dysregulation
When your nervous system is exposed to long periods of mental, physical, or medical stress the ANS can start to become dysregulated. This means it loses balance and struggles to regulate itself which has effects both medically and mentally. Due to the fact that the gut & brain are so highly connected dysregulation in one appears to be connected to dysregulation in the other. Autonomic dysfunction has been found to be associated with both organic GI diseases as well as functional GI disorders.
Vagus Nerve
The vagus nerve is a direct link from the gut to the brain & the brain to the gut. When dysregulation happens it often affects this key nerve pathway.
Vagal Tone
Vagal tone is a measurement of how well the vagus nerve is working. How well the vagus nerve is working is a good indicator of how much autonomic dysregulation there is. When the vagus nerve is not functioning well it’s called low vagal tone.
Selected Studies:
Functional Disorders / Disorders of the Gut-Brain Interaction
Current concepts in functional gastrointestinal disorders [sci-hub]
Heart rate variability characteristics of patients with irritable bowel syndrome and associations with symptoms [sci-hub]
Roles of Heart Rate Variability in Assessing Autonomic Nervous System in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders: A Systematic Review
Organic GI Diseases
Impact of Autonomic Dysfunction on Inflammatory Bowel Disease [sci-hub]
Review article: the role of the autonomic nervous system in the pathogenesis and therapy of IBD [sci-hub]
Altered sympathovagal balance and pain hypersensitivity in TNBS-induced colitis
Clinical and experimental evidence of sympathetic neural dysfunction during inflammatory bowel disease [sci-hub]
Vagal tone: effects on sensitivity, motility, and inflammation [sci-hub]
Autonomic Dysfunctions in Patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease in Clinical Remission
Vagus Nerve as Modulator of the Brain–Gut Axis in Psychiatric and Inflammatory Disorders
Selected Resources: