A new study finds that compared to healthy controls, people with Parkinson's disease appear to have distinctly different gut bacteria. They have hardly any bacteria from one family and the amount present from another family seems to increase with disease severity.

"Our most important observation was that patients with Parkinson's have much less bacteria from the Prevotellaceae family; unlike the control group, practically no one in the patient group had a large quantity of bacteria from this family." This bacterium aids in the creation of the vitamins thiamine and folate and the maintenance of an intestinal barrier protecting against environmental toxins. This finding may therefore have implications not only for diagnosis but also for dietary adjustments or vitamin supplementation for management of PD in the future. In people with Parkinson’s with more severe postural instability and gait difficulty, as opposed to tremor, the bacterium Enterobacteria was present at higher levels. The reasons for this association were not clear.

Funds from the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research and the Finnish Parkinson Foundation helped finance the study.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/286912.php

https://www.michaeljfox.org/foundati...acteria-levels

This post relates to the current threads on thiamine and faecal transplants.

The underlying paper being reported here is by Scheperjans et al. [1].

In addition to an association between low levels of prevotellaceae and a PD diagnosis, it shows within PwP that there is an association between low levels of prevotellaceae and high UPDRS-III total score. (Note: a low UPDRS score is good.)

It would be nice if the UPDRS-III score measured the underlying state of the disease, slowly getting worse as the disease develops. But, in fact, for many people it varies from minute to minute as the symptoms wax and wane influenced by their medications.

It is not known what the causal process is. It could be that low levels of prevotellaceae leads to poor symptomatic control, or that the Parkinson's medication leads to this state. But, but it could be that poor symptomatic control is caused by low levels of prevotellaceae. If this is the case, it would be worth investigating how to safely increase prevotellaceae levels.

Reference

[1] "Gut Microbiota Are Related to Parkinson’s Disease and Clinical Phenotype"
Filip Scheperjans, 2014
I can't get a url, but a Google search leads to a pdf.

John

Thanks John, did you see this: http://www.parkinson.org/Patients/Pa...to-Parkinsons-


particularly this:
"The onset of action of levodopa, the “on” duration of the medications, and the Parkinson’s disease scales improved moreso in the group treated for H. Pylori infection."

I think there's a more than fair chance that B vitamin deficiencies are at the heart of most PD. Whether that is problem is created via bacteria imbalances in the colon, or the blood brain barrier mechanism probably varies. It wouldn't surprise me if the research in intestinal biotics unearths a bunch of new treatments for a wide scale of illnesses. It's really a new frontier in medicine.

Keep in mind though that too much Prevotellaceae is commonly found in arthritis patients, so careful what you wish for.

When it comes to fecal transplants there is much to be learned. I had an exchange once with a researcher on this and he said that when they transplanted from anxious mice to calm mice, those mice became anxious as well. The brain/small intestine connection is very poorly understood at the moment.

Hi John

I can't get a url, but a Google search leads to a pdf.

Here is a PubMed link to the Abstract of the paper:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25476529

Interestingly the bad Enterobacteriaceae bacteria is associated with protein and animal fats while the good bacteria Prevotellaceae is associated with eating carbohydrates, veggies etc. So eating more fruits and veggies seems to be good for PWP! No surprise there!