Bacteria In Your Stomach May Help Prevent Parkinson's Disease

Parkinson's disease is a progressive disease of the nervous system characterized by tremor, muscular rigidity, and slow, an imprecise movement which mainly affects middle-aged and elderly people. Experts have been looking for something that would help prevent this from happening. Now, a new study, conducted by researchers from the University of Iowa, confirms that bacteria found in your gut play a crucial role in the preventing the onset of Parkinson's disease.

Medical Xpress reported that researchers at the University of Iowa have found that the gut bacteria may be a key player in the prevention of Parkinson's disease. According to the researchers, cells located in the intestine triggers an immune response that guards the neurons against damage that may cause Parkinson's disease. These intestinal cells, which snoop around like detectives, identify damaged neurons and get rid of the defective parts. That action ultimately preserves neurons whose impairment or death is known to cause Parkinson's.

According to Science Daily, Parkinson's disease is a brain disorder that destroys motor control and balance over time. It affects about 500,000 people in the U.S., according to the National Institutes of Health. Scientists have previously found that Parkinson's is connected to defects in mitochondria, the energy-producing machinery found in every human cell. Why and how mitochondrial defects affect neurons remains a mystery, but there are some who think that the damaged mitochondria do not feed neurons enough energy.

There are also others who believe that they produce a neuron-harming molecule. Whatever it is, damaged mitochondria have also been linked to other nervous disorders including ALS and Alzheimer's, and researchers want to understand why.

For the study, Prahlad's team exposed roundworms to a poison called rotenone, which they know kills neurons whose death is associated with Parkinson's. Surely, the rotenone started to damage the mitochondria in the worms' neurons. However, what surprised those researchers was that the damaged mitochondria did not kill all of the worms' dopamine-producing neurons. In fact, over a series of trials, an average of only seven percent of the worms, an estimated 210 out of 3,000, lost dopamine-producing neurons when given the poison.

"That seemed intriguing, and we wondered whether there was some innate mechanism to protect the animal from the rotenone," Prahlad says, reported Parkinson's News Today. After an in-depth analysis, researchers found that rotenone triggered several molecular immune pathways when the mitochondria stopped working. Inactivating these immune responses one by one allowed the team to home in on a specific pathway. When this pathway, called p38MAPK, was turned off, more neurons died.

More interestingly, the research team noticed that the immune pathway was activated only in the gut of the worms, and not in the nervous system. "We think somehow the gut is protecting neurons," Veena Prahlad, assistant professor of biology at the University of Iowa, said in a news release. "If we can understand how this is done in the roundworm, we can understand how this may happen in mammals."