 Hi, this is Dr. Ruscha with very good news for those that have depression. A very high level and well performed scientific study has just found that probiotics are an effective method for improving depression. Now specifically, a systematic review with meta-analysis found a significant reduction in depression after people both healthy and those with depression, so happiness scores I guess you could say to put it more plainly improved in both groups, but those who did not have depression and those who had clinically diagnosed depression. A systematic review with meta-analysis, kind of a big term but all this really means is that a group of researchers went through all the available clinical studies and summarized them to see what the aggregate finding of all the data was. So this is akin to if you were going to go to a restaurant asking 60 people what they thought of the restaurant and getting the average opinion instead of asking just one person what they thought about the restaurant that would be like looking at one study's result. This study, this systematic review with meta-analysis looks at all the available clinical trials and summarizes them. So this is probably the highest level of scientific evidence that one can produce and it did show a significant impact on depression by using probiotics. Now there might be a few questions. What type of probiotic and what dose doesn't seem to be hugely important? Some of these studies were using different doses, but most of the studies did tend to use lactobacillus and bifidobacterium prominent probiotics. So many probiotics contain different strains of lactobacillus and bifidobacterium probiotics and that's what these studies looked at. Not every study was the case, but the majority did. There are maybe you could say generally three classes of probiotics. There is lactobacillus, bifidobacterium mixtures and there's various types but they're all somewhat similar. There are healthy fungus probiotics, the predominant one there is saccharomyces bilardi and there are also soil-based probiotics. These often times they're known as spore forming or soil-based and you'll often time to see the name bacillus included in these types of probiotics. These are the least well studied, definitely seem to be effective also, but this analysis found that varying doses of varying types of probiotics all seem to be effective. Now why might this be? Well it may be because probiotics help decrease inflammation in the gut and inflammation can cause depression. It may also be because probiotics help decrease leaky gut and leaky gut can cause inflammation and food reactivity and that can lead to depression. It may also be because probiotics ironically can be antibacterial and antifungal and so in those that have bacterial overgrowth or fungal overgrowth or other types of dysbiosis or even certain types of infections, probiotics can help to rebalance those or clear those things out, improving one's gut health therefore decreasing inflammation and improving mood. So it's not an exhaustive list of the mechanisms but those are some of the major ones. In any case what matters here is the clinical outcome which is that for those with depression probiotics seem to be helpful. Now it does not mean that a probiotic will be helpful for everyone but going through and trying a few good probiotics is a very intelligent idea if you're suffering with depression. And this again is probably the highest level scientific evidence we have supporting that which goes back to reinforce a concept that we've talked about in other videos and I think is a very important one which is the connection from the gut to the brain. And really there's connections from the gut to many other parts of the body which is why I place such emphasis on the importance of gut health. In this case we see very high level scientific evidence showing the gut brain connection wherein using probiotics can help with depression. So this is Dr. Ruscio and I hope this information helps you get healthy and get back to your life. Thanks.