Pathways in gut-brain communication: Evidence for distinct gut-to-brain and brain-to-gut syndromes.

The article presents a study on epidemiological evidence for brain-gut and gut-brain syndromes. It discusses the psychological comorbidity with functional gastrointestinal disorder (FGID), the tendency for anxiety and depression to raise sympathetic and lower parasympathetic tone in the autonomic nervous system (ANS) in the brain-gut communication and the excessive production of TNF-α and other cytokines due to a microbe-gene-inflammation interaction under the gut-brain communication.