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Parkinson’s disease ‘may start in gut’

bbc.co.uk

11–20 of 139 posts

Re: Parkinson’s disease ‘may start in gut’

#11
post #6
post #2

I watched my great grandfather lose everything to Parkinson's. I really hope this leads to a treatment that stops the progression of symptoms and fast.

My father suffered from the disease and passed away in October. Awful disease. This is great news, but it looks like any treatment based on this will still be quite some way off.

    > but it looks like any treatment
    > based on this will still be
    > quite some way off
I came away with the opposite impression. Wouldn't you just need a targetted antibiotic?

Re: Parkinson’s disease ‘may start in gut’

#12
post #8

What do we know so far? - Gut Bacteria are involved - Inflammation is involved - The brain works on glucose - The brain can also work on Ketones - Cinnamon seems to help in mice trials (and also has anti-inflammatory properties). - Could diabetes be analogous to Parkinson's? Diabetics generally have lost the ability to process carbs (usually by eating too many); could Parkinsons be caused by people being very dopamin…

Exactly my line of thinking.

Sounds like a study should be done on the diets of those with Parkinson's compared to the "average" diet. There's a chance for too much or too little of something that could make a difference.

I would also like to see a comprehensive study of the immune systems of those with and without, perhaps these people have little protection against these gut bacteria.

The most interesting cases would be those with the right conditions for Parkinson's yet do not have it. I think those cases would be very revealing.

It's also interesting that these bacteria are transferable across species. What if these bacteria are found in common meats from aanimal? When preparing an animal to remove it's meat, I imagine there's an off chance the gut is split in removal - which they probably just hose down the animal as not to waste the meat. Or perhaps the bacteria has the ability to spread in the host?

This research has definitely opened up new avenues to look for root cause and possible prevention.

Re: Parkinson’s disease ‘may start in gut’

#13
post #10
post #8

What do we know so far? - Gut Bacteria are involved - Inflammation is involved - The brain works on glucose - The brain can also work on Ketones - Cinnamon seems to help in mice trials (and also has anti-inflammatory properties). - Could diabetes be analogous to Parkinson's? Diabetics generally have lost the ability to process carbs (usually by eating too many); could Parkinsons be caused by people being very dopamin…

I feel like your post is a is a rhetorical bait-and-switch: Only the first two points seem to be related to the article, the rest are from elsewhere and chosen ahead of time to guide the user towards a particular conclusion.

I think it's up to the reader to draw which ever conclusions they wish. I don't think this person is writing with any other purpose other than to share an opinion.

But... If you have points to the contrary of what the person has said, please raise them instead of guessing at their motive.

Re: Parkinson’s disease ‘may start in gut’

#14
From the article:

> The bacteria can break down fibre into short-chain fatty acids.

This doesn't make any sence. Fibre(fiber) is composed by carbohydrates bounded in a different way of the sugar that is used to sweeten.

Perhaps bacteria can eat fibre and produce fatty acids, but fibre is not made of fatty acids.

This is probably an error in the press article. Do someone with access to the research paper to understand what this means?

Re: Parkinson’s disease ‘may start in gut’

#15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never researched too much, mostly watched what happened to M.J.Fox. I thought PD was mostly affecting motor controls on non life critical muscles (limbs). What are the other effects ?

Dementia is common as the disease progresses. Dementia is horrible.

As in Alzheimer's dementia ? ..

Re: Parkinson’s disease ‘may start in gut’

#17

From the article: > The bacteria can break down fibre into short-chain fatty acids. This doesn't make any sence. Fibre(fiber) is composed by carbohydrates bounded in a different way of the sugar that is used to sweeten. Perhaps bacteria can eat fibre and produce fatty acids, but fibre is not made of fatty acids. This is probably an error in the press article. Do someone with access to the research paper to understand…

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3735932/

> Short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), the end products of fermentation of dietary fibers by the anaerobic intestinal microbiota ...

So yes, SCFAs are end products of the process. You are right.

Technically they are breaking down fibre into SCFAs but it didn't say they were made of them.

Re: Parkinson’s disease ‘may start in gut’

#18

From the article: > The bacteria can break down fibre into short-chain fatty acids. This doesn't make any sence. Fibre(fiber) is composed by carbohydrates bounded in a different way of the sugar that is used to sweeten. Perhaps bacteria can eat fibre and produce fatty acids, but fibre is not made of fatty acids. This is probably an error in the press article. Do someone with access to the research paper to understand…

Short chain fatty acids can be things like acetic acid, propionic acid, butyric acid. The fermentation process takes in fiber and puts out these guys, so while fiber isn't an SCFA polymer, I don't think this statement is inaccurate (i.e. I don't have the metabolic pathways off hand but these could be direct breakdown products given the shortness of the carbon chains - acetic acid almost certainly is.)

Re: Parkinson’s disease ‘may start in gut’

#19
post #12
post #8

What do we know so far? - Gut Bacteria are involved - Inflammation is involved - The brain works on glucose - The brain can also work on Ketones - Cinnamon seems to help in mice trials (and also has anti-inflammatory properties). - Could diabetes be analogous to Parkinson's? Diabetics generally have lost the ability to process carbs (usually by eating too many); could Parkinsons be caused by people being very dopamin…

Exactly my line of thinking. Sounds like a study should be done on the diets of those with Parkinson's compared to the "average" diet. There's a chance for too much or too little of something that could make a difference. I would also like to see a comprehensive study of the immune systems of those with and without, perhaps these people have little protection against these gut bacteria. The most interesting cases wou…

I can't imagine that diet and immune system studies haven't been done on Parkinson's sufferers?

Re: Parkinson’s disease ‘may start in gut’

#20

Tldr: they showed certain gut bacteria are necessary for Parkinson's to progress (but not the sole cause) using an experiment with genetically identical mice.

More importantly, our understanding of parkinson's wasn't "Transformed", so much as, somebody ran a highly specific experiment on a substrain of mice that is not representative of humans, and tried to generalize their results.
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