The immune system declines in old age and it migrates from the gut to the brain. Certain groups of gut bacteria like different nutrient environments, so the gut bacteria from this study might like that environment too.
Very interesting. I'm 45 and recently became chronically constipated. I determined that I had somehow killed off my gut bacteria and began a treatment of eating nothing but cruciferous salads each day, supplementing with probiotics (with as many bacterial strains as I could get). I was eating yogurts regularly, but none of those contained enough bacterial variety (you need many more strains to maintain health).
This restored me to perfect function and taught me that my gut microbiome was fucked up for years, even decades.
I cannot believe how good I feel and how perfectly my digestive system functions now. When the constipation hit I thought I was literally dying. Even a 100% raw vegetable diet was not digesting properly and would takes days to exit at first. Any carbs or bread at all would jam me up completely.
I have been maintaining perfect gut function since then by avoiding alcohol and eating a wide range of raw vegetables and cruciferous salads to feed the bacteria. However, I'm able to digest anything now, effortlessly. Remarkable.
I have been chronically constipated on and off for 5+ years now along side a variety of diseases of the brain (ADHD, depression, and epilepsy). Even at points in my life where I wasn’t taking anything that increased serotonin in the gut like an SSRI the constipation has persisted.
Have always felt like there was a link between my gut and brain but never been able to define it and my doctors brush it off. Now I’m starting to explore it on own alongside conventional treatments for my brain conditions.
Currently I’m focusing on natural sources of probiotics like kimchi and kefir. Mostly because I’ve never been able to identify which supplement is worthwhile.
How long did it take to see significant improvement and how long did it take before you figured you had restored perfect function? Can you elaborate on what you ate?
About 1 months for initial "OK, I'm not going to die" and about 3-4 months total.
I would make a several pound salad as my first meal of the day using cruciferous mix from Trader Joes. Mixed with shredded iceberg, raw vegetables (peppers, broccoli), crumbled corn chips, and par-boiled Tempe, and maybe a bit of shredded cheese. Dressing of choice.
For the first month I ate nothing but the salad(s) each day.
Often Greek yogurt with hulled hemp seeds and flax powder or nuts for desert.
Quick taibata session on the elliptical each day. Trained Krav-maga twice a week.
The most interesting thing to me is that I don't know how it got so bad. I was not eating junk, drinking soda or alcohol. Was getting decent exercise regularly. Drank water religiously. I had no antibiotics. I was admittedly eating a lot of home made bread products and was not eating enough raw foods in the runup to this issue.
Do you intend to take probiotics forever? I understand (possibly incorrectly) that the microbiome shifts back quickly as soon as any of the interventions stop, and while the others seem like they should be sustainable (part of a good lifestyle) I always wonder about how realistic it is to keep taking probiotics for life.
I'm not taking them now. I just try to maintain what is established. You shouldn't need to take them at all. The modern processed food diet, antibiotics, and other "toxins" cause our biome to die off. Some of the strains are not replaced by our food. There is a laundry list of strains in the high quality pills. Essentially, once you have it, you have it. Unless you fail to nourish it. It takes a while for the digestive track to rebuild itself after biome is restored. It has those cilia-like fingers that operate in a mucus layer, and those die back or recede as does the mucus layer. That takes a while to reestablish.
This is very interesting when thinking about the known link to higher Parkinsons/Alzheimers risk for people that are exposed to fungicides / biocides. Gut bacteria synthesize plenty of vitamins for the body, so it's not far-fetched to think that killing off a fraction of your gut biome due to exposure to these substances will lead to vitamin deficiencies and neurological problems. There are studies that show transplanting gut bacteria from healthy people can alleviate some motor symptoms of Parkinsons [1]. So take good care of your gut bacteria!
Unless you get a bad bug and go on heavy antibiotics. I had a bad pneumonia and had 4-day stay at my local hospital. And they pumped so much antibiotics I was sh!tt’n like a goose for weeks
Quaternary ammonium compounds (quats) are commonly used as fungicides and disinfectants in hospitals, and I fear for the health-care workers that have to touch them all day. Of course, we should use disinfectants in hospitals, but the long-term neurological effects to healthcare workers and terminally ill patients is concerning.
Also, IIRC, the basis of the true story behind the movie and book A Civil Action - oft recommended for students entering 1L (the book) due to its coverage of tort law.
This seems odd, as someone who has no medical knowledge. If it's just adding B vitamins, then a lot of people take vitamins. Especially when diagnosed with something as terrible as Parkinson's. I would expect to hear some anecdotal evidence on that for a diseases that is so common.
If we think about what vitamins are and consider the human body as an interconnected ecosystem with sub-ecosystems such as gut flora and skin flora, vitamins are compounds that your body cannot create from other compounds. Therefore, if these vitamins are not present, it could result in negative outcomes. Yet, the human body is remarkably good at making do, masking issues by priming itself for certain vitamins that are lacking in the diet. However, if this state is maintained for years, something has to give.
Science is finding that many chronic diseases, even some that have been thought incurable, are actually tied to lifestyle and diet. So, expect more of these articles.
There is an ongoing debate in science regarding which compounds should or shouldn't be classified as vitamins. But that discussion is beside the point.
Not only are vitamins important, but minerals are too. We cannot produce minerals ourselves.
Magnesium is involved in at least 300 different metabolic processes.
If these essential compounds are not available, metabolic processes become difficult or impossible, eventually leading to chronic diseases that had been thought of as inevitable.
The study of the article found that a subset cases of parkinson are related to lifestyle and diet.
They megadosed B2 in the test. Many B vitamins behave differently at those pharmacological doses - for example, B1 will start acting as a carbonic anhydrase inhibitor like acetazolamide beyond 1600mg. B1 at doses over 3000mg is known to slow down some cancers up to 36% but under 100mg to speed up other cancers, over 2000mg it helps with some ALS and MS mimics. B3 at 3000mg seems to alleviate pellagra that is often misdiagnosed as schizophrenia. Daily recommended allowances of all these are like 1-2mg.
Yes - I was a Chemist in another life and the reality of physiology is that it is insanely complex and "just take vitamin pills" can amount to Dunning Kruger if things like the medium (a suspension, a solid, the solvents around it to think of a few...) can play such a huge role in the body's ready uptake of the active ingredient.
I mean we kind of already know this anyway - "person dies of alcohol poisoning after vodka up the butt" was a legend as a student but also a story of how "x units alcohol" is an oversimplification. There are similar stories with class As and people varying up the modes of ingestion...
Coming back to food I have anecdotally observed that my lactose intolerance reaction is more severe if the lactose is in something creamy. Even lactase pills have reduced effect on that. Although cream may be where the lactose is concentrated for all I know
I wonder how that compares to the amount in Marmite, which seems to be often recommended by doctors in the UK for those deficient in vitamin B (and you’re in the lucky 50% of the population that actually likes it).
From the experience I have from doctors in Portugal, they will ignore that. My brother was not even warned by the doctor that he was pre-diabetic after checking his blood results.
You don't see tissue deficiencies in blood tests. You can have a local (e.g. brain) deficiency in the making for 30 years before it hits you and no blood test will show it as your body works hard on having perfect blood all the time.
B vitamin levels beyond B12 are rarely tested. You're unlikely to ever get it checked unless you experience specific neurological issues. Overtesting itself is dangerous, so... doctors don't have the incentive.
B12 can be tricky to pin down. It can be falsely elevated by vitamins.
You need cofactors, e.g. a B2 deficiency could falsely give the impression of repletion.
This is ON TOP of the really loose grounding of accepted ranges for various vitamins. Many of the levels are established on the basis of avoiding severe disease like vitamin D: "no rickets above this level" and B12: "no anemia above this level." Which is completely different than assessing optimal levels.
> This is ON TOP of the really loose grounding of accepted ranges for various vitamins. Many of the levels are established on the basis of avoiding severe disease like vitamin D: "no rickets above this level" and B12: "no anemia above this level." Which is completely different than assessing optimal levels.
This is concerning. Is there anyone keeping a database of optimal rather than minimal levels?
Dangerous in a sense: costs money right now, we would have to deal with it.
My friend once said: “no one is healthy, your doctor just does not have the testing resolution to find the issues” and in 3 years you get parkinsons…
That's too cynical. In reality, you're going to die with a number of completely benign issues. The more issues you find and try to interfere, the more likely you are to have a negative impact. And that's before running into issues with testing failures from a large number of tests. We not only can't find all issues, we can find more other issues than are ever going to be an actual problem.
But it's not really a money issue (not in a lot of cases anyway) - where it leads to better outcomes, doctors do aim for overdiagnosing to a certain % to cover cases which would be otherwise missed.
I really hope we dig into the gut processing of B group a bit more. Another candidate for improvements there is some types of ADHD. Some better defined links there would by awesome.
B6, B2 deficiencies in ADHD doi:10.1192/bjpo.bp.116.003491
But that's a deep hole and a good way to accidentally poison yourself. If you've just been diagnosed, you'll have lots of other, approved options to try first.
B2 has no known unsafe max limit and provides FAD+ for neurons, super important for electron transport chain. Megadosing B2 is known to improve migraine over time. B6 however can be toxic and the overload has about the same symptoms as deficiency, so one has to be careful there.
Great, they identified differences in gut bacteria. Their control group was usually the spouses, so they were geographically similar. Wonderful.
People with PD are on very different medications, controlled diets (you need to avoid protein at different parts of the cycle), and.... what 'simple treatment'?
The conclusions in that fluff piece are not in the original study. Sure, some bacteria are linked to differences in uptake of some vitamins, but why would adding more vitamins to the diet affect the PD? It isn't like that is the cause of PD, at best a symptom.
> Riboflavin (vitamin B2) in humans originates from food and gut microbiota. Therapeutically, riboflavin improves oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, neuroinflammation, and glutamate excitotoxicity, which are related to PD pathogenesis27. In a clinical study, high doses of riboflavin ameliorated motor deficits in PD patients28. In another disease, supplementation of riboflavin in patients with Crohn’s disease decreased systemic oxidative stress, inflammatory effects, and disease activity29. Supplementation of riboflavin to compensate for decreased riboflavin production by gut microbiota may be beneficial in PD patients.
> Biotin (vitamin B7) produces anti-inflammatory substances and decreases inflammation, which leads to the relief of allergy, immunological symptoms, and inflammatory bowel disease30. The effects of biotin on PD have not been reported to the best of our knowledge. In contrast, in multiple sclerosis, open31 and double-blind32 studies showed that biotin ameliorated motor and optical defects.
now these supplements are the tentative suggestion in the article.
what you _may_ validly point out is that these supplements are only identified as of _potential_ helpt, because follow up studies are needed to validate if this really is the case. but neither the study nor the article claim otherwise, right?
> "Supplementation of riboflavin and/or biotin is likely to be beneficial in a subset of Parkinson's disease patients, in which gut dysbiosis plays pivotal roles,"
Could really do with an easy way of viewing - for all important nutrients - all the best sources that you can eat where something you can't eat is a significant source.
So for example I enter that I can't eat beef liver (presumably via a helper group that I'm vegetarian or Hindu or no beef or something) and it tells me to keep up my chicken liver, whey protein powder, ... intake for riboflavin & biotin.
But doing that across all vitamins etc. at once having entered all the things you don't eat - because it's too much to be on top of otherwise, imo, and I think it's pretty easy to think you eat a balanced and varied diet but actually not have any good source of one or two specific things at all.
And again, more nuanced than "vegan diets", taking just the abstract of the linked hypothesis:
> Three recent case-control studies conclude that diets high in animal fat or cholesterol are associated with a substantial increase in risk for Parkinson's disease (PD); in contrast, fat of plant origin does not appear to increase risk.
> In aggregate, these findings suggest that vegan diets may be notably protective with respect to PD. However, they offer no insight into whether saturated fat, compounds associated with animal fat, animal protein, or the integrated impact of the components of animal products mediates the risk associated with animal fat consumption.
That is, the underlying cause could very well just be high cholesterol, and that the carnivores in the study were more likely to have high cholesterol than the vegan groups, either due to lifestyle choices (despite veganism itself not implying any sort of healthy lifestyle, there might be a stronger overlap with those choosing veganism and those leading a healthy lifestyle than for carnivores), or due to difference in dietary cholesterol intake.
Another example of nuance, from that very paper: "A very recent study, utilizing prospective data from
the Honolulu Heart Program cohort, indicates that heavy
regular consumption of coffee or other sources of caffeine
provides substantial protection from PD"
Later: "Surprisingly, tobacco smoking is
also markedly protective with respect to PD"
In general, the conclusions of it are weak because it's a very weak paper. These vegan diets were compared against what? I can't be bothered to follow all sources, but this paper doesn't seem to pose this question either, which is a noticeable omission which smells of agenda.
Are they comparing against people eating random junk like most of the Western world? Then of course any diet eliminating of our ultra-processed food is healthier, be it vegan, pescatarian, ketogenic, paleo, carnivore, Mediterranean, etc.
My Partner, who is 66 years old, was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease last year. We noticed that he was experiencing hallucinations, slow movement, disturbed sleep, and twitchy hands and legs when at rest. He had to stop taking pramipexole (Sifrol), carbidopa/levodopa, and 2 mg of biperiden because of side effects. Our family doctor recommended a PD-5 treatment from naturalherbscentre. com, which my husband has been undergoing for several months now. Exercise has been very beneficial. He has shown great improvement with the treatment thus far. He is more active now, does more, and feels less apathetic. He has more energy and can do more activities in a day than he did before. As far as tremors I observe a progress, he improved drastically. I thought I would share my husband's story in case it could be helpful, but ultimately you have to figure out what works best for you. Salutations and well wishes
Caution! Curious about this comment (having a family member with Parkinson's) I searched for treatment from naturalherbscentre.com and I found that this type of comment was copy-pasted elsewhere
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41531-024-00724-z