Danish Study Shows Patients with IBD are Likely to Get PD
A Danish study of sufferers with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and Parkinson disease (PD) found that sufferers with IBD had a 22% increased threat of developing PD over sufferers without IBD.
The research, printed in Gut, reviewed all Danish citizens aged 15 years or older from 1977 to 2014 in the largest and longest population-based research of connections between enteric inflammation and PD.
A growing body of analysis points to the role of the gut-brain axis in the development of PD, with irritation, irritable bowel syndrome, leaky gut, and altered intestine microbiota observed in the intestine, typically years before the onset of symptoms of PD.
The illness is strongly associated with the accumulation of Lewy bodies, that are eosinophilic deposits that happen inside the cell cytoplasm and are composed of a misfolded protein, alpha-synuclein.
Some research factors to the intestine as the origin of the misfolded protein, spreading by way of the vagus nerve into the brain.
In one research, alpha-synuclein injected in the intestine walls of rats migrated to the brain stem via the vagus nerve at a rate estimated to be from 5 to 10 mm per day, thus offering startling evidence of the gut-brain link.
Lewy pathology could be detected in the intestine of patients with PD as many as two decades before their prognosis via motor signs.
Furthermore, increases in intestinal alpha-synuclein are strongly correlated with modifications in gut microbiota that result in inflammation and elevated permeability of the gut wall.