Interesting... I have a history going back 20 years of stomach ulcers
caused by H-pylori.

I'm delighted to see that it also has beneficial effects.

Nic 59/17


On 23 May 2011 09:39, mschild <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Mouse study finds stomach ulcer-causing microbes may also affect brain
> By Tina Hesman Saey
>
>
> NEW ORLEANS — Brain cells may be the latest victim of a bacterial bad guy
> already charged with causing ulcers and stomach cancer.
>
> Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium that lives in the stomachs of about half the
> people in the world, may help trigger Parkinson’s disease, researchers
> reported May 22 at a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.
> Parkinson’s disease is a neurological disorder that kills dopamine-producing
> cells in some parts of the brain. People with the disease have trouble
> controlling their movements. About 60,000 new cases of the disease are
> diagnosed each year in the United States.
>
> Some previous studies have suggested that people with Parkinson’s disease are
> more likely than healthy people to have had ulcers at some point in their
> lives and are more likely to be infected with H. pylori. But until now those
> connections between the bacterium and the disease have amounted to
> circumstantial evidence.
>
> Now researchers are gathering evidence that may pin at least some blame for
> Parkinson’s disease on the notorious bacterium.
>
> Middle-aged mice infected with the ulcer-causing bacterium developed abnormal
> movement patterns over several months of infection, said Traci Testerman, a
> microbiologist at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in
> Shreveport. Young mice infected with the bacterium didn’t show any signs of
> movement problems. Testerman’s colleague, neuroscientist Michael Salvatore,
> found that Helicobacter-infected mice make less dopamine in parts of the brain
> that control movement, possibly indicating that dopamine-making cells are
> dying just as they do in Parkinson’s disease patients.
>
> The bacteria didn’t have to be alive to cause the problem. Feeding mice killed
> H. pylori produced the same effect, suggesting that some biochemical component
> of the bacterium is responsible.
>
> A candidate for the disease-causing molecule is modified cholesterol.
> Helicobacter can’t make its own cholesterol, so it steals cholesterol from its
> host and then sticks a sugar molecule on it. The structure of the modified
> cholesterol resembles a toxin from a tropical cycad; people in Guam who have
> eaten the plant's seeds have developed a disease called ALS-parkinsonism
> dementia complex. Testerman and her colleagues are trying to determine if the
> modified cholesterol alone can lead to Parkinson-like symptoms in mice or if
> some other factor from the bacterium is also needed.
>
> Even if the scientists show that H. pylori can cause or contribute to
> Parkinson’s disease, it’s not clear whether getting rid of the organism would
> be a good thing. Although the bacterium causes ulcers and stomach cancer, it
> also helps protect against allergies, asthma and esophageal cancer and other
> acid reflux diseases. It is hard to know at this point exactly how letting
> Helicobacter stay or making it go will affect any individual person, said
> microbiologist Stanley Maloy of San Diego State University. But it is clear
> that a possible link between Parkinson’s disease and the stomach bacterium can
> no longer be ignored.
>
> “There’s enough solid data that it would be wrong not to look into it more
> closely,” Maloy said.
> http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/74653/title/Suspect_bacterium_may_trigger_Parkinson%E2%80%99s
>
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