Researchers discovered that Parkinson’s patients and people at genetic risk have different compositions of their intestinal microbiota. The study involved more than a thousand participants from five countries, revealing the potential for early detection through analysis of intestinal flora.
An analysis of the microbes in the intestinal flora allows us to know whether a person is at increased risk of developing Parkinson’s disease, even before any symptoms appear, according to a study from University College London (), published in Nature Medicine.
Both Parkinson’s patients and healthy people, but at risk of developing the disease, have a distinct composition of intestinal microbes, a discovery that could pave the way for early detection of the disease through an analysis of the intestinal microbiota.
To achieve this result, researchers have developed an innovative method for studying the intestinal microbiotaapplied to 464 people in Italy and the United Kingdom, including 271 patients with Parkinson’s, 43 of whom were carriers of the GBA1 genetic variant that can increase the risk of developing the disease, and the rest were healthy individuals.
Data on the intestinal flora of these patients were compared with those of three other groups in the United States, South Korea and Türkiye, in a total of 638 people with Parkinson’s and 319 participants without the disease.
Researchers found that more than a quarter of the microbes that make up the intestinal flora (comprising 176 different species) present differences in abundance when comparing Parkinson’s patients and healthy individuals.
Some gut microbes are more common among people with the disease, while others are more abundant in healthy participants.
Changes in the intestinal microbiota are 15 times more severe in the more advanced stages of Parkinson’s disease than in the initial stagesaccording to the results.
Similar changes were observed in the group of people with a genetic predisposition but who did not develop the disease, although to a lesser extent than in diagnosed patients.
“The composition of the gut microbiota in people at genetic risk for Parkinson’s disease, but without symptoms, resembles an intermediate pattern between healthy individuals and Parkinson’s patients,” said one of the study’s authors, Anthony Schapira.
In the group of participants without genetic predisposition, 20% of those with the most striking changes in intestinal flora showed clinical signs more similar to those of patients with the disease, suggesting that they would have a greater risk of developing Parkinson’s.
Os were similar for the groups from the five countries studied.
The discovery opens a new line of research to identify people at risk of developing Parkinson’s through analysis of the intestinal flora, and also to study whether changes in the bacterial population can reduce the risk of developing the disease, explained the researcher.
