Parkinson’s- Just another Infectious Disease

Copyright: © 2015 Dow CT. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Anatomic staging of PD progression suggests that an unidentified neurotropic pathogen in the intestinal lumen triggers abnormal synuclein aggregation that, in turn, initiates a ''prion-like' ' process in the enteric nervous system (ENS) eventually achieving access to the central nervous system (CNS) via the vagus nerve (cranial nerve X). This protein aggregation, manifest as Lewy bodies, targets and destroys dopamine producing cells resulting in both the classic motor and non-motor symptoms of PD; with the non-motor symptoms predating the motor symptoms by years, or even decades. Commentary Neuroscientists are turning- or shall we say returning- to the intestinal tract to study Parkinson’s disease (PD). James Parkinson, in 1817, posed the following: “Although unable to trace the connection by which a disordered state of the stomach and bowels may induce a morbid action in a par