December 30, 2016 – Gut and Brain

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:05 — 1.5MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Anchor lead: Does what happens in your gut affect your brain? Elizabeth Tracey reports

The population of bacteria in your gut, known as the microbiome, has much to do with health and disease, burgeoning research clearly demonstrates.  Now a new study draws a relationship between events that take place in the gut with development of Parkinson’s disease. Ted Dawson, a PD expert at Johns Hopkins, describes the finding.

Dawson: There is a paper that just came out in Cell, which says that in Parkinson’s disease the abnormal folding of synuclein may actually start in the gastrointestinal tract and may be related to the bacteria that’s in your gut, and so if that’s the case it’s not a bystander it’s actually the cause and research is just going to take time to sort that out.  :27

Dawson notes that autoimmune conditions and colorectal cancer are just two of the many other conditions where the gut microbiome is thought to be involved. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.