And now for a different condition… Progressive Supranuclear Palsy

Most of the analysis that I have done recently has been either ME/CFS, Long COVID or Autism. If you look at the page entitled Medical Conditions with Microbiome Shifts from US National Library of Medicine you will see a lot of different conditions that may be influence by microbiome manipulation..

Today I got an email asking “My mother in law has Progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), and Diabetes  and is in a very bad state, there is no help from the mainstream medicine” with samples of her.

My first action is to see if there are any published studies on PSP and the microbiome. There was just one study: “Unraveling gut microbiota in Parkinson’s disease and atypical parkinsonism‘ 2018.

Progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) is a less well-known neurodegenerative brain condition which is sometimes misdiagnosed as Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimer’s disease (or other forms of dementia). Because of the similarity to some Parkinson’s symptoms during the early stages of the disease, PSP is included in a group of diseases called Parkinson’s Plus Syndrome or Atypical Parkinsonism. However, PSP progresses much faster, causes more severe symptoms, responds very poorly to Parkinson’s medication, and has a significantly reduced life expectancy.

Parkinson’s Europe

At this point out a recent news story, Woman who smelled her husband’s Parkinson’s helps scientists come up with diagnostic test, Sky News, Sep 7,2022. When some ones gut bacteria changes, their smell change. On a little morbid note, in WW2, they could tell dead soldiers apart from their smell (he’s a German, he’s an Italian, he’s an American) [Story]. So avoiding scented products may have health benefits. In Vietnam war, it was different — the Viet Cong favorite smell was Old Spice, it means that there were Americans close by.

Foreword – and Reminder

I am not a licensed medical professional and there are strict laws where I live about “appearing to practice medicine”.  I am safe when it is “academic models” and I keep to the language of science, especially statistics. I am not safe when the explanations have possible overtones of advising a patient instead of presenting data to be evaluated by a medical professional before implementing.

I cannot tell people what they should take or not take. I can inform people items that have better odds of improving their microbiome as a results on numeric calculations. I am a trained experienced statistician with appropriate degrees and professional memberships. All suggestions should be reviewed by your medical professional before starting.

Analysis

We lack any special studies nor any Medical Conditions with Microbiome Shifts from US National Library of Medicine(PubMed) which matches this person except for Diabetes. We do not have enough samples for Special Studies for Diabetes. For the PubMed, this person is sitting at the 95%, so a definite include. There is another PubMed that seem appropriate and which is at the 99%ile, Brain Trauma

Looking at data in detail, we see a definitely interesting microbiome. We have a high quality sample

CriteriaCurrent SampleComment
Lab Read Quality10.6High Quality
Bacteria Reported By Lab960Very high Count
Bacteria Over 99%ile237 is expected, so high
Bacteria Over 95%ile8548 is expected
Bacteria Over 90%ile15596 is expected
Bacteria Under 10%ile29696 is expected
Bacteria Under 5%ile26748 is expected
Bacteria Under 1%ile2427 is expected
Rarely Seen 1%56
Rarely Seen 5%182
Pathogens59
Outside Range from JasonH8
Outside Range from Medivere16Candidate
Outside Range from Metagenomics8
Outside Range from MyBioma7
Outside Range from Nirvana/CosmosId19Candidate
Outside Range from XenoGene5
Outside Lab Range (+/- 1.96SD)37Candidate
Outside Box-Plot-Whiskers194Candidate
Outside Kaltoft-Moldrup347Candidate
Condition Est. Over 99%ile3
Condition Est. Over 95%ile20
Condition Est. Over 90%ile29

Dr. Jason Hawrelak Recommendations are at 99.7% so no red flags from that. There is a huge number of PubMed matches, I will only use the best ones for what was reported for this person. The following sets of suggestions are going to be used for our Consensus Report

  • PubMed: Brain Trauma
  • PubMed: Type 2 Diabetes
  • Outside Range from Medivere
  • Outside Range from Nirvana/CosmosId
  • Outside Lab Range (+/- 1.96SD)
  • Outside Box-Plot-Whiskers
  • Outside Kaltoft-Moldrup

The consensus download is below

PSP_ConsensusDownload

Probiotics

From KEGG, we see many of the Equilibrium and PrescriptAssist bacteria listed with the following further down the list (in descending order) (Remember : Lacticaseibacillus is the new name for Lactobacillus)

From the consensus we have (in decreasing order), a similar list.

My gut feeling is that the following products are likely a reasonable choice.

I would suggest starting with whatever arrives first, starting with a low dosage and increasing every second day. Remember to review with your medical professional.

Vitamins

A vitamin B complex and Vitamin C are recommended

Supplements

The top items are all available on Amazon and other stores:

Herbs And Spices

Diet Style

Bottom Line

This person wife also has issues, see And now for a different condition… Part 2. The suggestions are different but creating two different menus everyday would be challenging. See that post for a possible solution.

One of the items cited that I did not include above was dopamine (prescription). Looking at a treatment site for PSP in an attempt to do cross-validation, we see that dopamine is a factor, but things are more complex, see: Excessive dopamine neuron loss in progressive supranuclear palsy [2008].

When I started this project, I saw the potential of using the microbiome as a method to identify candidate treatments in the absence of successful clinical treatments. This is the first attempt of putting this into practice.