Affiliations 

  • 1 Department of Medical Microbiology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
  • 2 Division of Neurology and the Mah Pooi Soo & Tan Chin Nam Centre for Parkinson's & Related Disorders, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
  • 3 Sengenics Sdn Bhd, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
  • 4 Department of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
PLoS One, 2016;11(4):e0153725.
PMID: 27100827 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0153725

Abstract

Parkinson's disease (PD) is the second most common chronic and progressive neurodegenerative disorder. Its etiology remains elusive and at present only symptomatic treatments exists. Helicobacter pylori chronically colonizes the gastric mucosa of more than half of the global human population. Interestingly, H. pylori positivity has been found to be associated with greater of PD motor severity. In order to investigate the underlying cause of this association, the Sengenics Immunome protein array, which enables simultaneous screening for autoantibodies against 1636 human proteins, was used to screen the serum of 30 H. pylori-seropositive PD patients (case) and 30 age- and gender-matched H. pylori-seronegative PD patients (control) in this study. In total, 13 significant autoantibodies were identified and ranked, with 8 up-regulated and 5 down-regulated in the case group. Among autoantibodies found to be elevated in H. pylori-seropositive PD were included antibodies that recognize Nuclear factor I subtype A (NFIA), Platelet-derived growth factor B (PDGFB) and Eukaryotic translation initiation factor 4A3 (eIFA3). The presence of elevated autoantibodies against proteins essential for normal neurological functions suggest that immunomodulatory properties of H. pylori may explain the association between H. pylori positivity and greater PD motor severity.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.