At first, he noticed a twitch in one of his fingers. “It’s nothing”, he
thought. But as time went on, the movements did not stop. So Michael J Fox, who
played Marty McFly in the popular Back to the Future film saga, decided
to go to the doctor, who, unfortunately, diagnosed him with Parkinson’s disease
in 1991. At that time, the American actor was only thirty years old. Like him,
there are 6.3 million people suffering from this condition worldwide, according
to the European Parkinson’s Disease
Association. Normally, the age of onset is over sixty, but it is
estimated that 10% of patients are diagnosed before the age of fifty – and
that’s what happened to the actor.
Parkinson’s
disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative condition that
results in the gradual loss of cells responsible for the production of
dopamine, a neurochemical transmitter essential for the coordination of
movement. That means that this neurological disease eventually renders some
patients unable to walk, to talk or even to take care of themselves. As things
are now, researchers do not know either the exact cause or a cure for the
condition. However, a new study conducted at the University of Helsinki and
the Helsinki
University Central Hospital seems to shed some light on the
subject.
Finnish experts led by neurologist Filip
Scheperjans of the Departament of Neurology of the Helkinski
University Hospital, showed for the first time that there
are differences between the gut microbiota of PD patients and that of healthy
subjects and that these differences may be related to both the
symptom’s severity and the clinical phenotype of the disease. This new study
fits in a chain of previous research that proposed PD to be of
gastrointestinal origin.
Based on a study conducted with 72 Parkinson’s patients and 72 control
subjects, Scheperjans and his team saw that patients with Parkinson’s had much
less bacteria in their guts from the Prevotellaceae family
than their healthy counterparts did. Researchers also detected a direct
correlation between the amount of microbes from the Enterobacteriaceae genus
in the intestines of patients and the degree of severity of balance and walking
problems. The more Enterobacteriaceaethey had, the more severe
their symptoms were. In a short
article published in www.gutmicrobiotaforhealth.com, Doctor
Scheperjans stated that, “the abundance of Enterobacteriaceae was
related to the severity of postural instability and gait difficulty. So there
was a connection between the gut microbiota and the motor symptoms of our
patients. Our study is the first to demonstrate alterations of gut
microbiota composition in neurodegenerative disease”.
Researchers are now re-examining the same patients, in order to
determine whether the differences are permanent, and whether the intestinal
bacteria are associated with the progression of the disease and, therefore, its
prognosis. “We will have to see if the changes in the bacterial ecosystem
existed before the onset of motor symptoms. We will, of course, also try to
establish the basis of this connection between intestinal microbiota and
Parkinson’s disease, what kind of mechanism binds them”, Scheperjans considers.
This new study, founded by the Michael J Fox
Foundation for Parkinson’s Research and the Finnish Parkinson Foundation,
which has been published in Movement
Disorders, the clinical journal of the International Parkinson and
Movement Disorder Society, is in addition to other recent papers that have been
able to relate gut microbes to a variety of health conditions and diseases such
as obesity, depression, schizophrenia and lupus.
Scheperjans and his team hope that their results could be used to create
a diagnostic test for Parkinson’s disease, and may pave the road for the
development of better treatment strategies and, possibly, even prevention
strategies that focus on microbiota.
http://www.gutmicrobiotaforhealth.com/en/is-there-a-link-between-gut-microbiota-and-parkinsons-disease/
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