Dr. Trisha Pasricha

Those shouldn't cause pain, but they do when you have irritable bowel syndrome.

And that was measurable.

It turns out from this experiment and several others that followed, and then they looked at epidemiological studies in humans, that trauma to the gut, to that brain in the gut, can actually be what causes the anxiety later in your life, the depression later in your life.

And then once you have anxiety, once you're sort of hypervigilant about the pain that you're feeling, of course that can, we know that causes a feedback loop down to the gut again.

And it can form this vicious cycle where these things feed off of each other

But importantly, if we took a step back in a lot of cases with IBS, the disorders that we would consider brain disorders, they actually started first in the gut.

And we're seeing that not just in IBS, but now in my laboratory, we're studying Parkinson's disease.

And often when a lot of the response I get is like, wait, you're a gastroenterologist.

Why on earth are you studying Parkinson's disease?

And it's because just like so many other diseases that we once framed as being primarily a problem of the brain in your head, we're learning that they start in the gut.

They start early in the gut.

In Parkinson's, there's this whole hypothesis that's now very well supported by the evidence that at least for a subset of patients, that misfolded protein called alpha-synuclein, which is the hallmark of Parkinson's disease, we think it starts to misfold first in the gut decades before it reaches the brain.

Yeah.

Parkinson's disease is a disease that we typically think of affecting people who are a little bit older.

in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and often how it manifests is with tremors and difficulties with movement.

They might have rigidity of their muscles, difficulty walking, and tremors, and then there's a whole host of other complications that can go with it.

And that's sort of how we thought about Parkinson's for several decades.

And we know that certain risk factors for Parkinson's, like, for example, in America, where people play football and they get head injuries and concussions, that can certainly put you at increased risk of Parkinson's.

And what we know also to be true is that there is this protein called alpha-synuclein that misfolds.

And when it misfolds, it seems to be involved in why these particular dopamine neurons die.