Background:
There is increasing evidence of an altered gut microbiome in individuals with Parkinson’s Disease (PD). However, few studies have focused on the functional, metabolic impact of this dysbiosis. A reduction in microbial diversity, or change in enterotype, could alter the production of key health-promoting metabolites. Potentially increasing deleterious products and cultivating a gastrointestinal environment primed for neuroinflammation.
Method:
To investigate the specific metabolic pathways influenced by the dysbiotic gut microbiome present in PD, this study collected faecal samples from an Australian cohort of individuals with idiopathic PD (n=58) at two time points for comparison as a matched pair, and alongside healthy, aged-matched controls (n=81). Following extraction, samples underwent high-throughput targeted metabolic phenotyping using a validated, ultraperformance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (UPLC-MS/MS) approach.
Results:
Following data pre-processing, 87 metabolites of interest were identified for analysis. Unsupervised principal component analysis (PCA) showed distinct clustering of quality controls, demonstrating reproducibility of extraction and processing. Supervised orthogonal projection to latent structure-discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA) established separation between control and PD groups. Univariate analysis highlighted multiple significant metabolite differences between the groups.
Conclusions:
This study provides further evidence of the functional impact related to the gut dysbiosis present in PD. Further exploration should focus on reaffirming these results, exploring possible biochemical pathways impacted by perturbed metabolites, and identifying a metabolic signature of PD, which could offer a much-needed biomarker for disease.