Dr. Trisha Pasricha

And we found that people...

who had damage to their mucosal lining.

These would be from things like too much NSAIDs.

These are non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen.

That can damage your lining.

Those people have a 76% increased risk of going on to develop Parkinson's later in life.

So we know that there's these possible triggers.

We haven't worked out all of the mechanisms yet, but triggers that begin in the gut.

And the idea is that...

As that protein starts to misfold because of that trigger, it travels from the enteric nervous system up and ascends the vagus nerve, and eventually it reaches the brain.

And what's exciting about this from a research standpoint is that because this process is happening years, if not decades, before it hits the brain, there's an opportunity to potentially try to identify it and stop it before we get there.

And that's sort of the long-term goal of all of our research programs.

There's very good data that anxiety and depression are influenced by the brain in your gut, by your gut.

They can start in your gut, but even be molded by your gut.

There's also data in earlier stages than in Parkinson's disease about Alzheimer's.

So some of these symptoms too about constipation being a predictor for developing Parkinson's disease, well, they saw a similar pattern for Alzheimer's dementia as well.

And actually, interestingly, the pathway that I described about alpha-synuclein protein misfolding and traveling up the vagus nerve in Parkinson's disease is actually very well understood in some aspects.

We have an even poorer understanding in Alzheimer's about how these two things are linked.

But we know that there seems to be a strong association there.

We know that there's an association there between GI symptoms and autism, for example, which typically has been thought of as a disorder that lives in the brain.