Gut-central nervous system axis is a target for nutritional therapies

Historically, in the 1950s, the chemist Linus Pauling established a relationship between decreased longevity and obesity. At this time, with the advent of studies involving the mechanisms that modulate appetite control, some researchers observed that the hypothalamus is the "appetite centre" and that peripheral tissues have important roles in the modulation of gut inflammatory processes and levels of hormones that control food intake. Likewise, the advances of physiological and molecular mechanisms for patients with obesity, type 2 diabetes mellitus, inflammatory bowel diseases, bariatric surgery and anorexia-associated diseases has been greatly appreciated by nutritionists. Therefore, this review highlights the relationship between the gut-central nervous system axis and targets for nutritional therapies

The reciprocal relationship between alliance and early treatment symptoms: A two-stage individual participant data meta-analysis

Objective: Even though the early alliance has been shown to robustly predict posttreatment outcomes, the question whether alliance leads to symptom reduction or symptom reduction leads to a better alliance remains unresolved. To better understand the relation between alliance and symptoms early in therapy, we meta-analyzed the lagged session-by-session within-patient effects of alliance and symptoms from Sessions 1 to 7. Method: We applied a 2-stage individual participant data meta-analytic approach. Based on the data sets of 17 primary studies from 9 countries that comprised 5,350 participants, we first calculated standardized session-by-session within-patient coefficients. Second, we meta-analyzed these coefficients by using random-effects models to calculate omnibus effects across the studies. Results: In line with previous meta-analyses, we found that early alliance predicted posttreatment outcome. We identified significant reciprocal within-patient effects between alliance and symptoms within the first 7 sessions. Cross-level interactions indicated that higher alliances and lower symptoms positively impacted the relation between alliance and symptoms in the subsequent session. Conclusion: The findings provide empirical evidence that in the early phase of therapy, symptoms and alliance were reciprocally related to one other, often resulting in a positive upward spiral of higher alliance/lower symptoms that predicted higher alliances/lower symptoms in the subsequent sessions. Two-stage individual participant data meta-analyses have the potential to move the field forward by generating and interlinking well-replicable process-based knowledge. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)