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Currently, available drugs for PD are symptomatic, and disease progression is inexorable, and patients will ultimately suffer from disability.
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Despite much progress has been made to understand the genetic and environmental factors contributing to PD development in the past decades, the pathogenesis of PD remains far to be fully elucidated. Neuropathologically, the hallmarks of PD mainly include the progressive degeneration of dopaminergic nigrostriatal neurons and the formation of aggregated α-synuclein, called Lewy bodies, in the brain. Clinically, PD is characterized primarily by severe and progressing tremors, rigidity, posture instability, and cognitive impairment. PD is estimated to affect about 1% of populations over the age of 60. Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most prevalent neurodegenerative disease in the elderly after Alzheimer’s disease. More well-designed clinical studies recruiting large-scale PD patients are encouraged in future. The therapeutic and diagnostic potentials of gut microbiota for PD are discussed. Due to relatively limited number of available studies and covered patients, the associations between oral and nasal microbiota and PD remain inconclusive. Overall, these studies supported the differences of gut microbiota between PD patients and matched controls, while significantly altered bacterial taxa among studies were not identical. This paper briefly summarizes the main findings concerning the differences of human microbiome across several important mucosal interfaces, including nose, mouth, and gut between PD patients and controls as obtained from a total of 13 studies published since 2015, which covered a total of 943 PD patients and 831 matched controls from 6 countries.
![proteus for parkinsons proteus for parkinsons](https://media.springernature.com/lw685/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41598-018-19646-x/MediaObjects/41598_2018_19646_Fig7_HTML.jpg)
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most prevalent neurodegenerative disease, and in an effort to identify novel therapeutic target for this disease in recent years, human microbiota has attracted much interest.