People with Parkinson's disease often suffered from constipation earlier in life
The Economist, 23 August 2001
a little stopped up? Can't get relief? Research in Hawaii suggests that
constipation, especially when it defies laxatives, could be an early
symptom of Parkinson's disease. The more constipated you are, the more
likely you are to go on to develop the neurological problems that cause
the muscular tremors which characterise Parkinson's.
research, published recently in Neurology by Robert Abbott of the
Pacific Health Research Institute in Honolulu and his colleagues,
examined data on 6,790 Japanese-American men. These men were
participants in a long-term health study as one part of which, from
1971 to 1974, they reported the frequency of their bowel movements.
Over the subsequent 24 years, 96 of them went on to develop Parkinson's
That patients with Parkinson's often suffer
constipation is well known—James Parkinson himself noted it when he
characterised the syndrome in 1817. But Dr Abbott wanted to know if the
men who eventually got the disease were blocked in the bathroom long
before other symptoms started to show up.
were. The fewer their daily bowel movements during the early 1970s, the
greater their risk of developing the disease. Those who reported less
than one movement a day were 2.7 times more likely to develop
Parkinson's than those who had one a day—and 4.5 times more likely to
do so than men who boasted more than two each day. Also significant is
the finding that men who used laxatives but got little relief from them
were the most likely of all to develop Parkinson's.
suggests to Dr Abbott that Parkinson's may not be simply a disease of
the brain, as is now believed. It may, rather, be something more
systemic. The pathology of constipation and the pathology of
Parkinson's disease are similar, he says. In particular, Parkinson's is
associated with a lack in the brain of a messenger molecule called
dopamine. Nerve cells in the colons of constipated people lack
dopamine, too. Even more intriguingly, nerve cells in the colons of
Parkinson's sufferers who are constipated contain structural
abnormalities known as Lewy bodies, which are a hallmark of the
affected brain tissue in people with Parkinson's. In other words, the
first sign of the movement disorder associated with Parkinson's may be
in the gut, not the brain.