Appendix offers clue to Parkinson’s risk

WASHINGTON — Scientists have found a new clue that Parkinson’s disease may get its start not in the brain but in the gut — maybe in the appendix.

People who had their appendix removed early in life had a lower risk of getting the brain disease decades later, researchers reported Wednesday.

Why? A peek at surgically removed appendix tissue shows this tiny organ, often considered useless, seems to be a storage depot for an abnormal protein — one that, if it somehow makes its way into the brain, becomes a hallmark of Parkinson’s.

But the study published in the journal Science Translational Medicine also found that lots of people This microscope image of an appendix shows evidence of an abnormal protein that is a hallmark of Parkinson’s disease. may harbor clumps of that worrisome protein in their appendix — young and old, people with healthy brains and those with Parkinson’s.

But don’t look for a surgeon just yet.

“We’re not saying to go out and get an appendectomy,” stressed Viviane Labrie of Michigan’s Van Andel Research Institute, a neuroscientist and geneticist who led the research team.

After all, there are plenty of people who have no appendix yet still develop Parkinson’s. And plenty of others harbor the culprit protein but never get sick, according to her research.

Doctors and patients have long known there’s some connection between the gastrointestinal tract and Parkinson’s. Constipation and other GI troubles are very common years before patients experience tremors and movement difficulty that lead to a Parkinson’s diagnosis.

Wednesday’s research promises to re-energize work to find out why and learn who’s really at risk.

“This is a great piece of the puzzle. It’s a fundamental clue,” said Dr. Allison Willis, a Parkinson’s specialist at the University of Pennsylvania who wasn’t involved in the new studies.

Parkinson’s Foundation chief scientific officer James Beck, who also wasn’t involved, agreed that “there’s a lot of tantalizing potential connections,” but he pointed out that scientists still don’t know “what starts it, what gets this whole ball rolling.”

The team’s discovery that many people harbor the protein in the gut suggest it’s not enough to trigger Parkinson’s, Labrie said. There has to be another step that makes it dangerous only for certain people, which her team plans to study next.