Scientists link gut bacteria to Parkinson’s disease symptoms.
A recent study has discovered an indirect link between the various form of gut bacteria and the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. The study was recently published in the journal Cell and it suggests that the disease may very well begin in our digestive systems.
Parkinson’s disease, which causes tremors and stiffness as well as several digestive issues, was long thought to be caused by high concentrations of protein in our brain. However, the new study has shown that administering mice with microbes taken from Parkinson patients, worsened the animals’ symptoms. This was not the case they researchers used samples from healthy people.
The team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology was led by Sarkis Mazmanian, decided to act based on previous studies which revealed that the gut bacteria of people suffering from Parkinson looked different than that of healthy individuals. More specifically, there are even certain classes of bacteria which were either missing or depleted from patients with Parkinson’s.
This has led the researchers to think that the gut bacteria may somehow be linked to the disease. Their experiments used genetical identical mice so that the only variable was the gut bacteria. Their findings revealed that gut bacteria do indeed regulate and are even required for the various symptoms of Parkinson’s.
Although the researchers are not entirely clear on how the bacteria affects the development of Parkinson’s, their findings do strengthen the emerging research which reveals that certain brain disorders may also be influenced by bacteria in our digestive systems.
If future research does indeed prove a direct connection between Parkinson’s and gut bacteria, then researchers are very optimistic about a possible treatment as getting drugs into the gut is much simpler than getting them to the brain. Mazmanian has also founded a company known as Axial Biotherapeutics, meant to explore any possible treatments through this link.
Researchers studying gut bacteria have not been able to classify them all, and determining which exact ones influence the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease might prove even more difficult. Companies that sell probiotics claiming to cure a range of disease have no solid proof to back up their claims, and if they have helped anyone it was very likely that it only by chance.
Image credit: Caltech
