Dr. Jeffrey Bland explains how gut bacteria influence Parkinson's and Alzheimer's risk. A Nature Medicine study found a distinct microbiome pattern linked to Parkinson's. Dysbiotic microbes send signals through the immune system to the brain's microglia, but these factors are modifiable through intervention.
Would you be surprised if I told you that your microbiome in your gut can cause something to happen in your brain like Parkinson's or Alzheimer's? That was such a revolutionary thought just a few years ago that would have been heretical to any kind of good thinking. But now, suddenly, the body of literature and the research advances that we're making says that it's absolutely true. Hi, I'm Dr. Jeffrey Bland, a nutritional biochemist, and been involved in this field for about 4 or 5 decades, I guess. And what I'm excited to see is how we're starting to recognize that even things like neurodegenerative disorders, like Parkinsonism, may be associated with this interconnection between the gut and the brain and its immune system. This was recently now in arguably one of the top medical journals in the world, Nature Medicine, with an article that was just published, Microbiome Signature of Parkinson's Disease in Healthy and Genetically at-Risk Individuals. Yes, what we're starting to see is that signals that come from a dysbiotic microbiome that then travel through the immune system signaling system down through systemic circulation of the blood and ultimately to the brain's microglia can have an effect directly on conditions that we have diagnosed as being neurodegenerative diseases, not just Parkinson's alone, but also Alzheimer's disease. So I think that these are modifiable factors. That's the neat thing about this. It's not just like locked in stone. You can actually do something about this. And We're going to be talking a lot about that, a lot more over the next months to come. So not only stay tuned, but please subscribe. Be with us.
