Solving the Cause of Parkinson’s Disease, As An Academic in This Field

Building on and completing the “gut-first hypothesis” of Parkinson’s disease (PD).

Figure 1. Neurotoxic Lewy bodies (arrowheads) and Lewy neurites (arrows) comprising α-synuclein aggregates in the brain of a PD patient. Source: Ingelsson (2016).

For my Master’s degree in Science (by research), my thesis was on Parkinson’s disease (PD), where I studied its disease mechanism and potential treatments in lab-grown neurons. Naturally, I knew a fair bit about PD in general from my 2–3 years of master’s research.

For those unfamiliar, PD is a motor disorder due to degenerated neurons in the brain that control movement. As a result, PD patients show motor deficit signs such as tremors (shaking) and bradykinesia (slow movement). PD is quite common, being the second most common neurodegenerative disease after Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Muhammad Ali, known as the greatest boxer of all time, for example, suffered from PD.

But to this day, the cause of PD remains unclear, and there’s no cure. One of the hot topics about the cause of PD is the gut-first hypothesis, where α-synuclein protein becomes misfolded in the gut and spreads to the brain via the vagus nerve (Figure 2). Misfolded α-synuclein then aggregates into neurotoxic Lewy bodies and neurites (Figure 1). To this day, this topic remains heavily discussed in academia and major news outlets.