United States: Parkinson’s may begin in the gut and migrate to the brain, and this is occasioned by a chain reaction triggered by gut bacteria, as revealed in new research.
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The lower tract of the gastrointestinal can house a large number of microbial communities often referred to as the microbiota. Parkinson’s disease alters gut microbiota composition, favoring some families over others.
One family is called Enterobacteriaceae, comprising a well-known microbe, Escherichia coli or E. Coli in short.
According to Elizabeth Bess, the senior study author and an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Irvine, “As there’s more Enterobacteriaceae, there’s less motor function,” as livescience.com reported.
In other words, as the number of microbes present increases, the movement-related symptoms of Parkinson’s deteriorate, Bess stated.
Now, in two recent studies, Bess and colleagues have identified a series of events that begin with E. coli and result in the accumulation of protein aggregates in the gut – the same protein aggregates observed in Parkinson’s disease patients.
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Previous studies have proposed that, in some manner, these clumps in the gut trigger a formation of clumps in the brain, perhaps through this highway of nerves connecting the two organs.
Hence, the new studies may point to how the gut microbiome fits into that sequence of events.
Some of the Parkinson’s cases may not develop in the gut first and then spread to the rest of the body, although there are likely some that do move in the opposite direction.
According to Bess, “We don’t know what fraction is starting in the gut, at this stage,” livescience.com reported.
However, if researchers learn more about the gut-to-brain cases, it may be possible to stop this specific type of disease, she added.
To find out how protein clumps appear in the gut, the researchers turned to previous works about the brain.
They may serve to explain why the chemical messenger known as dopamine is problematic in Parkinson’s disease.
Furthermore, it is said that cells in the aging brain could add up iron that conflicts with the structure of dopamine, which acts as a chemical messenger.
That dopamine, in turn, can interact with healthy proteins called alpha-synucleins and stick together in a place.
The team wanted to know if something very similar to this might also happen in the gut – an organ that has lots of dopamine.
The researchers wanted to know how E. coli interacted with the gut when it’s inflamed or under oxidative stress, so they nourished the bacteria in a petri dish with iron and nitrate.