Overview
- The peer-reviewed Nature Medicine study, published Monday, reports a distinct gut microbiome in people with Parkinson’s and an intermediate pattern in healthy carriers of a high‑risk GBA1 gene variant.
- Researchers identified 176 microbial species that differed between patients and healthy controls, and 142 of those species also differed in asymptomatic GBA1 carriers.
- The pattern held up in independent cohorts from the UK, Korea, and Turkey that included an additional 638 people with Parkinson’s and 319 controls, supporting its reproducibility across populations.
- People with Parkinson’s showed more potentially pro‑inflammatory microbes such as Bifidobacterium longum, B. dentium, Streptococcus mutans, and Lactobacillus paragasseri, while helpful butyrate‑producers like Roseburia and Faecalibacterium were reduced, a shift that may affect gut and immune health.
- Dietary data linked more varied eating patterns to a lower‑risk microbiome profile, and the team proposed exploratory tools such as a 16‑feature microbiome score, though they stressed that predictive use and prevention strategies require long-term follow-up.