The reason it is not being flagged as high is because we’ve disabled flagging of higher than our typical range level for producers of these neurotransmitters.
There are a few reasons for this:
- It is not yet known if higher levels of these producers in the gut translate to higher levels in the brain
- It is possible that higher levels in the gut are better rather than worse
- The percentage is just an indicative number as we don’t have exact figures in terms of how good the various bacteria are at producing these neurotransmitters
We only flag items where more is known about the implication of it – like toxins, enzymes, etc. This section is also still in beta and therefore is subject to change and research updates. This applies to most of the information on our platform as the gut microbiome space is a field of active research but some sections like the neurotransmitters are less well understood at this stage than others.
This flagging exclusion applies to all neurotransmitters included in the Biomesight report with the exception of histamine. Histamine is an exception as histamine produced in the gut has implications for those with conditions like histamine intolerance, mast cell activation syndrome and allergies.
I elaborate a little more on it in this blog:
https://biomesight.com/blog/exploring-gut-bacterial-metabolites