Gut microbiome is not associated with mild cognitive impairment in Parkinson's disease

Abstract

Gut microbiome differences between people with Parkinson's disease (PD) and control subjects without Parkinsonism are widely reported, but potential alterations related to PD with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) have yet to be comprehensively explored. We compared gut microbial features of PD with MCI (n = 58) to cognitively unimpaired PD (n = 60) and control subjects (n = 90) with normal cognition. Our results did not support a specific microbiome signature related to MCI in PD.

Fig. 1. Microbial diversity and differential abundance comparisons for Parkinson’s disease with and without mild cognitive impairment.

a Boxplot for richness (Chao1). b Boxplot for richness and evenness (inverse Simpson). c Community composition visualized as NMDS ordination of Bray-Curtis dissimilarity; ellipses indicate 95% confidence intervals. d Boxplot for groupwise distances to centroid from the ordination, with significances for pairwise comparisons from Tukey HSD test. e Numbers of differentially abundant taxa (multiple comparison corrected p < 0.05). In boxplots, box hinges represent the 1st and 3rd quartiles, whiskers range from hinge to the highest and lowest values that are within 1.5*IQR of the hinge, and outlines represent data distributions.