The Parkinson's disease gut has an overabundance of opportunistic pathogens

(University of Alabama at Birmingham) In 2003, Heiko Braak proposed that Parkinson's disease is caused by a pathogen in the gut that could pass through the intestinal mucosal barrier and spread to the brain through the nervous system. Until now, no evidence of a specific pathogen that may trigger PD was found; now researchers report for the first time a significant overabundance of a cluster of opportunistic pathogens in the PD gut.