Journal of Cellular Neuroscience and Oxidative Stress

Abstract

Evidence suggests that intestinal microbiota, especially in the case of dysbiosis, may affect the progression of neurological diseases and may even lead to the formation of the disease. It has been realized that decreasing diversity in aging gut of the microbiota may be an important factor in the development of neurodegeneration. Neuroinflammation is one of the major mechanisms that associate microbiota with agerelated diseases. Intestinal microbiota; plays a key role in the activation of microglia and it is suggested that manipulation of intestinal microbiota, especially withshort chain fatty acid producing bacteria, may modulate neuroimmun activation (Westfall et al. 2017). On the clinical and scientific level, most neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Disease related pathology may spread across the nervous system in a self-propagative fashion. Importantly, there is a strong bidirectional interaction between gut microbiota and the central nervous system, a connection recently termed the “microbiota-gut-brainaxis” (Jiang et al. 2017; Houser and Tansey, 2017). While the effects of the autonomic nervous system on gut physiology have been known for a long time, we are just beginning to understand that gut microbiota has strong effects on CNS physiology as well. The vast number of ways through which gut microbiota affects the host shows intriguing overlaps with pathways previously implicated in neurodegeneration. Although evidence for involvement of microbiota in neurodegenerative diseases is still very preliminary, initial findings are extremely promising (Zhu et al. 2017). This presentation will give an overview of recent findings regarding the connections between gutmicrobiota and neurodegenerative disorders and how this may reshape our understanding of these diseases.