Adam McCauley

June 26, 2017 (nytimes.com)

Your skin is a tapestry of ecosystems roughly the size of three bath towels. Complex societies of bacteria, viruses and fungi live in these diverse habitats — from the oil fields of the face and back, to the damp caverns of the nose, to the parched and hairless palms.

For decades researchers have argued that some of the skin’s microscopic residents are partly to blame for certain disorders, such as acne and eczema. Now, it seems, bacteria may be part of the treatment, too.

Dr. Richard Gallo, a dermatologist and biologist at the University of California, San Diego, and his colleagues recently concocted an innovative microbial treatment for eczema, a disorder characterized by red, itchy, inflamed skin. The recipe was relatively simple.

Dr. Gallo had discovered that Staphylococcus hominis and Staphylococcus epidermidis, typically friendly members of the human skin microbiome, can kill Staphylococcus aureus, which is known to play a role in eczema. So the team swabbed S. hominis and S. epidermidis from the skin of a few volunteers with eczema, grew the bacteria in the lab, and incorporated the microbes into Cetaphil lotion.

Dr. Gallo and his collaborators published their results earlier this year in Science Translational Medicine.

“It’s the first time anything like this has been shown,” said Elizabeth Grice, a research dermatologist and microbiologist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the experiment. “What remains to be seen is whether this kind of treatment can reduce the severity of skin disease over the long term.”

Only in the last few years have scientists seriously studied how to therapeutically modify the skin’s native colonies of microbes. Understanding this unique microbiome may yield new ideas for treating various dermatologic conditions.

Some studies suggest, for example, that people prone to acne carry more of the microbe Propionibacterium acnes on their skin. A disturbance in typical bacterial populations leads to conflict between P. acnes and neighboring species, the theory goes, which in turn triggers an inflammatory response in the skin.

In another study published late last year, Dr. Gallo and his colleagues injected a beneficial strain of Staphylococcus epidermidis, along with some food that only it could digest, into the ears of mice. The combination treatment, known as a synbiotic, encouraged the growth of S. epidermidis, which in turn reduced both the number of P. acnes and level of inflammation in the mice.

Other scientists have been reporting similar findings. In 2014, a team in South Korea and the United States showed that an extract from Helicobacter pylori — a common resident of the human stomach — also can inhibit P. acnes and decrease skin inflammation in mice.

Scientists in Canada have demonstrated that people who take both probiotics and antibiotics have significantly fewer acne lesions after 12 weeks, compared with people who take only one or the other.

Several private companies are racing to capitalize on a growing consumer appetite for probiotic cosmetics, toiletries and topical treatments. The biotech company AOBiome offers a “live probiotic spray,” for instance, that is meant to replenish populations of beneficial skin bacteria.

Many microbiologists worry, however, that the science is nowhere near advanced enough to justify the proliferation of these products. Scientists still have a lot to learn about what microbial ecosystems look like on healthy skin, how they change during illness, and how to safely interfere.

Topical probiotics can easily rub off and be transferred to other parts of the body or other people, Dr. Grice pointed out. Just because a microbe kills one species of pathogen does not mean it is unwaveringly “good” or peaceful.

And what if the bacteria in a lotion or spray were to infiltrate the body via a cut or scratch?

Dr. Grice agreed, however, that the idea is intriguing. Whereas typical antibiotics and antiseptics indiscriminately kill all kinds of bacteria throughout the body and drive the evolution of highly dangerous microbes impervious to existing drugs, probiotics may be much more selective.

And probiotics that successfully colonize the body have the unique ability to evolve in concert with a surrounding ecosystem. After all, genuine microbe-based therapies are not just cocktails of molecules; they contain living organisms that persist and adapt. Dr. Gallo calls his experimental lotion an “evolutionarily honed” treatment.

“There are so many new potent medicines right under our nose,” he said.

June 21, 2017 (nytimes.com)

If athletes practice meditation for a few minutes a day, they may become better able to withstand the mental demands of hours of strenuous physical training, according to an interesting new study of Division I college football players.

The study, which compared different types of mental training for stress resilience, could have relevance for anyone planning to start exercising or competing more intensely this summer.

Exercise, as most of us know, is a form of stress. The demands of exercise require our bodies to respond and adapt, and the greater the intensity of the exercise relative to our current fitness, the greater the level of stress it generates.

Much of this strain is physical, but some of it also involves the mind, says Amishi Jha, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Miami in Florida, who led the new study. Prolonged, strenuous training “requires attention,” she says, and a stern focus on continuing to exercise when it might be more pleasant to stop.

So for the new study, which was published in April in The Journal of Cognitive Enhancement, she and her colleagues wondered whether teaching people to relax or to hone their focus might improve their overall well-being. In effect, they wanted to find out whether training the athletes’ minds while they were also taxing their bodies might help to mitigate some of the undesirable effects of exercise on their thinking and emotions.

To find out, she and her colleagues turned to a group of athletes who face reliably outsize levels of physical and mental stress: Division I football players.

With the cooperation of the team’s coaches and student captains, Dr. Jha and her colleagues gathered players for the University of Miami team just as they were about to start four weeks of preseason training. During this time, the players would be attending summer classes while also undertaking a grueling regimen of aerobic and strength training, culminating in evaluations from coaches about starting positions. It is a particularly stressful period for the athletes.

Dr. Jha and her colleagues asked each player to complete a computerized test of his ability to focus and rapidly respond to various combinations of numbers flashing on the screen. The players also filled out questionnaires about their current mood and sense of well-being.

The researchers then divided 100 of the athletes into two groups.

One began a program of supervised relaxation training, during which they listened to calming music and learned to systematically relax their muscles.

The other group was taught mindfulness meditation, which involves paying close attention to breathing and to the present moment.

These sessions, whether of relaxation or meditation, were short, lasting for about 12 minutes, and usually took place immediately after the players had finished strength training and were still gathered in the team gym. The students also were asked to practice the same mental techniques on their own throughout the week.

At the end of four weeks of the intense preseason, the players repeated the original tests of their attention and happiness.

The results showed that, in general, they were feeling the strain. For most of them, performance on the test of sustained attention dropped significantly, meaning that they were far more apt to lose focus now. They also were gloomier, according to questionnaires about their moods.

But there were differences. The more an athlete in the relaxation group had practiced relaxing, the less his mood had tended to decline, the researchers found.

And those in the meditation group, if they had practiced often, showed considerable mental resilience, with higher scores than the other athletes in either group on the measures of both attention and mood.

Over all, these data suggest that mental training of almost any kind may help to alleviate some of the emotional and cognitive strains that otherwise occur during physical training, Dr. Jha says.

But mindfulness meditation was more effective than simple relaxation at helping athletes to maintain their ability to focus, she points out.

This study was, of course, specialized, involving young, male, elite football players, whose lives and bodies are not representative of those of the rest of us. The study was also short-term and its scope limited. The researchers did not examine whether mental training improved players’ performance on the field, although Dr. Jha says that they hope to study that issue in the future.

Still, the results are promising, she says, in part because the commitment required was so slight.

“We only asked for about 12 minutes a day” of mental training, Dr. Jha says.

For the rest of us, she says, the study’s message would seem to be that if we plan to substantially ramp up our normal exercise routine, perhaps in anticipation of our first triathlon or a faster 5-kilometer race time, we might wish also to learn to mindfully meditate. (You can find advice about how to start in the Well Meditation Guide.)