Could the appendix be a starting point for Parkinson’s disease?

Researchers have identified the appendix as a reservoir for disease-associated proteins related to Parkinson’s disease (PD), with appendectomy shown to lower the risk of PD development in the largest epidemiological dataset study yet. Viviane Labrie, research lead from Van Andel Research Institute (MI, USA) and her team studied two independent epidemiological datasets involving 1.6 million individuals, and observed that removal of the appendix decades before PD onset reduced the risk of developing PD by between 19 to 25%. The study examined the health records of 1,698,000 individuals with and without previous appendectomy, using data from the Swedish National Patient Registry...