NPJ Parkinson's diseaseNov 4, 2025

Thinking abilities are linked to abnormal protein activity in the stomach in early Parkinson’s disease

Gut-Brain Axis Weekly Brief ↗PubMed ↗DOI ↗OA ↗

Updated Jun 27, 2026

Abstract

Essence

Gastric seeding may mark gut-brain pathology and relate to cognition in early Parkinson's disease.

Evidence

Prospective biopsy study of 22 early-stage Parkinson's disease patients and 17 controls found gastric alpha-synuclein seeding in 45.5% of patients and 0 controls, with score correlated with lag time in positive replicates.

Caveat

The sample was small, the assay missed more than half of Parkinson's disease patients, and the cognition correlation came only from positive replicates.

Simplified

(AS) accumulation is more frequently detected in the stomach than in the colon of patients with Parkinson's disease (PD), suggesting its potential as a pathologic biomarker. This study is to evaluate the diagnostic performance of real-time quaking-induced conversion assay on stomach biopsies for early PD and its association with clinical characteristics. Stomach biopsy tissues were prospectively collected from 22 patients with early-stage PD and 17 controls. Pathological AS-seeding activity was assessed, and correlations between kinematic parameters and clinical features were analyzed with age adjustment. Pathological AS-seeding activity was detected in 45.5% of patients with PD and in none of the controls. The score was correlated with the lag time of positive replicates (Spearman's ρ = 0.742; p = 0.022), after age adjustment. The AS seed amplification assay using the stomach tissue may serve as a biomarker reflecting disease pathophysiology of the gut-brain axis in PD.

Key numbers

10 of 22

Pathological -seeding Activity Positivity

Detected in stomach biopsies from patients with early

0.742

Correlation Coefficient

Spearman's correlation between score and of positive replicates

25.4 ± 3.8

Cognitive Assessment Score

Mean score of patients with

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Funding

Competing interests

Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.

PubMed

Thinking abilities are linked to abnormal protein activity in the stomach in early Parkinson’s disease

Abstract

Key numbers

Full Text

Funding

Competing interests

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