• Posted October 25, 2024

Antibiotics Reveal Links Between Gut Microbes, Parkinson's

Certain gut microbes might be linked to a person’s risk of developing Parkinson’s disease, a new study suggests.

People prescribed multiple courses of penicillin antibiotics have a modestly lower risk of developing Parkinson’s, researchers found.

Those antibiotics might be affecting bacterial populations in the gut, which in turn might play into Parkinson's risk, researchers say.

Folks who received five or more courses of penicillin within a five-year span had a 15% lower risk of Parkinson’s compared with those who took no antibiotics, results showed.

And the more penicillin courses a person took, the lower their Parkinson’s risk, noted lead researcher Dr. Gian Pal, a neurologist at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey.

The results add to increasing evidence that microbes living in the human digestive tract might play a role in Parkinson’s, a degenerative brain disorder that affects movement and balance.

For example, some researchers think that inflammation promoted by gut bacteria could add to Parkinson’s risk, and others believe that certain bacteria might release toxins that affect the nervous system.

“There's an idea that the disease starts in the gut and that inflammation in the gut can make the gut more leaky and allow toxins or inflammation to ascend to the brain through the vagus nerve,” Pal explained.

For the study, published recently in the journal Parkinsonism & Related Disorders, researchers compared more than 12,500 medical records of U.K. patients with Parkinson’s to more than 80,800 similar people without the disorder.

The study also found that people who took two or more courses of antifungal drugs within five years had a 16% higher risk of Parkinson’s.

However, Pal noted the associations are relatively small and need further study before they should be weighed into a person’s medical decisions.

“These are all very mild, so it should not influence decisions about when to use antibiotics or antifungals,” Pal said in a Rutgers news release. “The importance of the study is that it speaks to the idea that something is going on in the gut microbiome could influence Parkinson's disease."

“The fact that a medication that you take only for a few days to alter your microbiome in a small way alters your Parkinson's risk -- to me, that makes a stronger case that the microbiome is implicated,” Pal added.

Follow-up research should hone in on the association of specific fungi or bacteria with a person’s risk of Parkinson’s, Pal said.

“Better understanding what the antifungal composition is in the gut -- which really hasn't been well explored -- and seeing if that is useful in distinguishing Parkinson's patients from non-Parkinson's patients would be useful,” Pal said.

More information

The National Institute on Aging has more about Parkinson’s disease.

SOURCE: Rutgers University, news release, Oct. 23, 2024