Joy Kong, MDRegenerative Medicine Physician, Educator, and Entrepreneur

Is Parkinson's a Gut Disease?

27 Aug 2025 · 1 min

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0:58

This YouTube video (transcript excerpt) discusses links between Parkinson's disease and the gut microbiome. It reports that people with Parkinson’s have a distinctive, diminished gut bacterial profile, and that causal direction is unclear. The speaker describes emerging research showing that photobiomodulation (termed “photobiomics”) can shift patients’ microbiomes toward a healthier profile and that microbiome changes tend to coincide with alleviation of Parkinson’s symptoms.

Chapters

Parkinson's is very interesting because it has a very specific bacterial profile. They have a very specific gut profile, which is more diminished. You know, it's more limited than a healthy profile, which kind of makes people wonder, you know, is it because they have Parkinson's, they have this bacterial profile, or is it because they have this bacterial profile that's led to Parkinson's? But either way, what they found is after exposure to photobiomodulation for a period of time, that people tend to go back to a more healthy profile. This is a hot topic in research right now. Now is called photobiomics, to kind of designate that we're looking about how light affects bacteria. In the case of the Parkinson's, do they show after they change the microbiome of the patient, that their mental brain issues are improved? Yes. A change in the microbiome tends to go with an alleviation of the symptoms of Parkinson's.