Parkinson's May Begin in the Gut and Spread to the Brain

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Researchers at Aarhus University and Aarhus Hospital found that Parkinson’s disease begins in the gastrointestinal tract, moves through the vagus nerve, and ends up in the brain. Parkinson’s disease is a chronic neurodegenerative disease that affects the nervous system, mainly the motor system. Over time, people with Parkinson’s develop involuntary shaking, slowness, and difficulty with movement. Researchers conducted a study of 15,000 patients who have had the vagus nerve in their stomach severed. This used to be a common procedure about 30-40 years ago as a method to treat stomach ulcers. The prediction of the researchers was that if Parkinson’s disease really does originate in the stomach and moves through the vagus nerve, then the people with a severed vagus nerve should be protected from the disease. Their prediction was correct; these people were protected against Parkinson’s. To further prove this to be true, they found that the patient’s who only had a small part of the vagus nerve severed, were not fully protected against Parkinson’s. This proves that the disease does travel through that nerve to get to the brain. Another piece of evidence that researchers found was that many patients suffered from gastrointestinal symptoms before being diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Although researchers still do not know exactly what causes Parkinson’s, figuring out how it travels through the body is a major breakthrough and will help to guide further research to find a cure.

I thought this article was very informative. I did not know that researchers have figured out where Parkinson’s originated in the body and I think that is an amazing breakthrough for the research of this disease. This will now allow researchers to have a better understanding of what triggers Parkinson’s in the first place. This disease affects approximately 1 out of every 1,000 people. That is a significant amount of people who have to suffer from this disease. I believe that continued research for Parkinson's will eventually lead to a cure and it will save thousands of people’s lives.


http://neurosciencenews.com/parkinsons-gastrointestinal-tract-neurology-2150/

Comments

  1. Eddie HanleyMay 1, 2017 at 8:37 PM

    This article reminds me a bit of one of my two blog posts which discussed the brain-body relationship in terms of diabetes. This ties in perfectly with the information presented throughout the semester that minute changes in physiology throughout the body can dramatically effect the neural functioning of the brain. Throughout the history of physiology a debate raged, as it still does today, as to which effects the other more, the body, or the brain. I think this article makes a good case that changes in the body, much like one of my posts and our class had covered, communicate to the brain how to respond, more so than the brain directly telling the body what to do.

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