Everybody poops, but not how we thought. At least, not since researchers at McMaster University discovered the secret of segmentation.
But Jan Huizinga, professor in medicine at McMaster, said his team of researchers has finally solved the poop puzzle.
Segmentation refers to how the body slows down food and breaks it up once it reaches the intestines, Huizinga said.
For years, scientists have struggled to understand this process, which he said can be responsible for trapping and digesting food in the small intestine for hours on end. Huizinga said most scientists believed the gut’s motor patterns were primarily controlled by the nervous system, but there was never conclusive proof.
According to the team’s research, published March 10 in the journal Nature Communications, the motor pattern in the intestine is actually the result of complex interactions between the nervous system and two different cell networks, called pacemakers.
“The intestine has a complete nervous system inside the muscle layers of the gut . . . very much like the brain,” Huizinga said. “We didn’t know too much about it.”
“One of the reasons why it took so long [to make the discovery] is that we always looked in the wrong spot,” he said.
According to Huizinga, during an unrelated experiment two years ago, he accidentally discovered the second type of pacemaker cells while using a nerve blocker to stop nervous functions.
Andrew Pawelka, a member of the research team, said the team never expected to produce such a high impact paper when they began researching.
“Basically, it was almost serendipity, how everything can come together and produce a great theory,” Pawelka said.
Now that scientists understand how the body slows food down to digest it, Huizinga said he sees promise for research in treatments for illnesses and diseases like diarrhea and constipation.
“Almost all medication and almost all good treatment is related to figuring out how the body does it,” Huizinga said.
Pawelka, who recently graduated with a masters degree in health sciences, said the team is now focused on trying to better understand the newly discovered pacemaker cells. They are also attempting to isolate the particular nutrients responsible for stimulating the small intestine’s motor patterns.
“We have an idea and a hypothesis for how segmentation works in the small intestine. We have the big picture,” Pawelka said. “Now we need to focus on the smaller details of how everything comes together . . . basically working out the finer details of the theory.”
