Scientific review article on nutraceuticals (mostly plant derived natural products) and Parkinson disease

[Rhyothemis]

Nutraceuticals: An integrative approach to starve Parkinson's disease. Lama et al. (2020) pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/345...

keywords: brain, aging, inflammation, neuroinflammation, mitochondria, oxidative stress, herbs, supplements

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note: by posting this I am not endorsing the content - I'm posting since the article might be of interest to others. The abstract states, 'The intake of nutraceuticals or nutritional modifications are generally safe and can be combined with current common drug therapy in most cases' - I think this is an overgeneralization. If something has main effects it can also have side effects and also harmful interactions can occur.

[park_bear]

Thanks for this. The state of the field is such that almost all studies used animal models. The only clinical study I saw mentioned was this one:

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/283...

which showed a beneficial effect of omega-3 fatty acids. But there might be others that I missed.

The validity of animal models is highly variable depending on how they are used. They can check if a substance protects against toxic insult, which is invalid as to whether a substance might remedy PD, in my opinion. The better studies check if a substance repairs the damage after toxic insult, which does approximate our situation as humans. Unfortunately that distinction is not made in reviews such as this.

[Rhyothemis in reply to park_bear]

Thanks for pointing out the stuff on omega-3 - the article seems to have cherry-picked among the animal studies. There are a number of gene-mod PD & MSA mouse model studies that have found harm from dietary DHA*. Then they state, "As mentioned above, fish oil has demonstrated to limit the progression of PD" without a reference, but AFAIK the only study on it was Mischley's observational study. The Taghizadeh clinical trial was not on fish oil or DHA, but flax oil and vitamin E as alpha tocopherol. Flax oil is mostly ALA, which is reportedly not converted very efficiently to DHA in men or post-menopausal women (i.e., most people w/ PD). Flax oil may also contain lignans. Hard to know what was responsible for the benefit.

I don't know what to make of the DHA gene mod model studies - I guess it is a mouse vs. human difference, but these are supposed to be the best models to recapitulate human disease.

* - ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/a...

[SilentEchoes]

Saved your post, thank you!

SE