Dr. Diego Bohórquez

Is it pleasurable or painful, so to speak, in broad terms?

And I say this because on the pain side...

Professor David Julius, Professor Holly Ingram, Jim Byra at UCSF, they have done some beautiful work demonstrating that there are these serotonin-releasing cells, specifically in the colon, they have focus in the colon, that they couple to nerve fibers of the spinal cord

And when they are activated, now all of a sudden they drive what we call in the clinical realm, visceral hypersensitivity.

So they are responsible for triggering the hypersensitivity of the nerve fibers, the colonic nerve fibers, because they detect noxious stimuli.

And then ultimately they gate that noxious stimuli and pass it on to the nerve fiber as, in broad terms, as a painful stimulus.

So is this irritable bowel syndrome?

It is.

We could call it as the biological basis of what could degenerate into irritable bowel syndrome and so on and so forth.

Or these chronical GI, they call them disorders of gut-brain interactions.

in the clinic.

That's correct.

And when I think about that specific example is that after there has been this rewiring of

of the intestine.

Then now the intestine is very sensitive, so to speak, to the stimuli.

And when those lipids from the yolk start to enter the intestine, if that sensitivity has changed, meaning it could have changed in how fast it reacts to the stimulus or how fast it communicates to the stimulus and how sensitive it is to the saliency or like the strength of the stimulus,

it could communicate that, ooh, what it used to be repulsive with a tiny little bit amount, now it is actually pleasurable with a tiny little bit of amount.

And here's a clear example.

So it has been very well, I will say that it has been documented

in the clinic, that patients that undergone gastric bypass surgery, they're actually more prone.