Dr. Trisha Pasricha

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2,195 appearances 5 recordings 5 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 8 Jul

Dr. Trisha Pasricha’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 2.

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Science Friday · How does the gut-brain connection work? · 8 Jul 2026 podcast

And when you go look in the literature, it turns out that's been well described.

We showed this, we replicated in my lab, but people tend to get nausea.

Sometimes we call it gastroparesis when it causes a delay of movement of the stomach.

constipation, and all kinds of GI symptoms years if not decades before the motor symptoms that we often think about as being Parkinson's related like the tremors.

We think that for at least a subset of patients now, we know this, that the disease itself begins in the gut.

As you mentioned, Flora, Parkinson's is characterized by misfolded alpha-synuclein protein.

It's this protein when it misfolds, it causes the death of the dopamine neurons in a certain part of the brain.

Well, they've done these studies that started in mice and now we have human data that found that in some people, there's some trigger that happens.

It's probably a different trigger for lots of people.

There have been a lot of research and interest in pesticides, for example, paraquat.

We've talked a lot about that in our field.

Ultra processed foods is potentially implicated.

Maybe it's an infection.

There's lots of different things that enter our body through the gut and

and potentially trigger that misfolding or even other changes that we haven't yet quite understood that are related to it.

But that misfolded protein starts to misfold in the stomach, for example, and then it propagates like a prion, which is a kind of disease that basically induces the next cell to start misfolding.

And then that one causes the next one, next one, and it goes up the vagus nerve to the brain.

And it turns out in humans back in the 70s and beforehand, we were doing this procedure called a vagotomy pretty often where we would cut the vagus nerve for certain conditions like really bad ulcers or severe reflux.

Well, if you look at the natural history of what happened to people during that time period, and obviously we don't do this that often anymore.

It's not necessarily like we shouldn't all be getting vagotomies.

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