Pr Bojing Liu and his team at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm (Sweden) believe that Parkinson disease would not start in the brain but rather in the intestine. The disease would then spread to the brain via the vagus nerve, a nerve that runs through the body from the brain to the abdomen and controls unconscious bodily processes such as heart rate and food digestion.
Cutting the vagus nerve lowers the risk of Parkinson’s disease
In a new study, Swedish researchers set out to find out if the risk of Parkinson’s disease decreases when branches of the vagus nerve are cut by a surgical procedure called a vagotomy. This operation is usually performed to reduce acid secretion in the stomach for treatment and prevention ulcers.
They followed 9,430 people who underwent a vagotomy between 1970 and 2010 until their eventual diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease and compared them with 377,200 individuals from the general population.
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During the study, 101 people (or 1.07%) who had a vagotomy developed Parkinson’s disease, compared to 4829 people in the control group (or 1.28%). A difference considered insignificant.
However, when the two types of vagotomy (total or partial) were compared in the analysis, the team observed a lower risk of Parkinson’s disease in the group of patients who underwent total vagotomy. According to Professor Liu’s findings, they are 40% less likely to develop Parkinson’s disease than people who still have their vagus nerve.
“These results provide preliminary evidence that Parkinson’s disease may begin in the gut. Further evidence for this hypothesis is that people with Parkinson’s disease often have gastrointestinal problemswhich can start decades before they develop the disease”.
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