“Neurological disorders are now the main cause of disability in the world and Parkinson’s disease is the one that is experiencing the fastest growth” underlined the American experts at the start of the year. Many scientists are therefore looking into the causes of the disease in the hope of stopping this pandemic.
The disease would come from the belly and not from the brain
Among these researchers, many are those who believe that the disease does not begin in the brain but rather in the intestine (our 2nd brain!). Among them, researchers from the University Hospital of Helsinki in Finland, who discovered that the consumption of antibiotics could make the bed of Parkinson’s disease, by altering the intestinal microbiota.
“The link between antibiotic exposure and Parkinson’s disease is consistent with the current view that pathology is linked to microbial changes, years before the onset of motor symptoms typical of Parkinson’s disease,” says the Prof. Filip Scheperjans, neurologist at Helsinki University Hospital and lead author of this study published in Movement disorders.
For this study, researchers followed 14,000 people diagnosed with Parkinson’s and studied their medical records to determine their antibiotic use. They compared the results with those of a cohort of 40,600 people not affected by the disease.
Read also :
- Calcium implicated in Parkinson’s disease
- Parkinson’s: promising immunotherapy trials
- Parkinson’s: a new warning sign to watch closely