ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Neurosci.
Sec. Gut-Brain Axis
Volume 19 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnins.2025.1654995
This article is part of the Research TopicAdvances in Neurodevelopmental and Neurodegenerative Disease Research: Focus on Innovative Human-Relevant Brain ResearchView all 8 articles
Exploring Gut Microbiota Alterations in Parkinson's Disease: Insights from a 16S Amplicon Sequencing Eastern European Pilot Study
Provisionally accepted
Ovidiu Dumitru Ilie1*
Irina Cezara Văcărean-Trandafir22
Roxana-Maria Amărandi2,3Ilinca Bianca Nita (Ilie)4
Petru-Romeo Dobrin4,5Mara Doroftei5Iuliu Cristian Ivanov2Gheorghe Savuta1Boris Kirov3Bogdan Doroftei5- 1Universitatea de Stiintele Vietii Ion Ionescu de la Brad din Iasi, Iași, Romania
- 2TRANSCEND Research Centre, Regional Institute of Oncology, Iași, Romania
- 3Tehniceski universitet-Sofia, Sofia, Bulgaria
- 4Spitalul Clinic de Psihiatrie Socola Iasi, Iași, Romania
- 5Universitatea de Medicina si Farmacie Grigore T Popa lasi, Iași, Romania
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Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder increasingly associated with alterations in gut microbiota through the gut–brain axis (GBA). However, studies examining microbiota composition in Eastern European populations remain limited. We profiled the gut microbiota of 59 Romanian individuals using 16S rRNA gene sequencing (V3–V4 region), ultimately including 39 subjects (19 PD patients and 20 healthy controls [HC]) after quality filtering. Clinical metadata were collected to assess potential confounders, including age, sex, metabolic parameters, lifestyle, and comorbidities. PD patients differed significantly from HCs in glycemia (p = 0.02), cholesterol (p = 0.027), and LDL levels (p = 0.047), and presented more frequently with restrictive diets and comorbidities such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Despite no significant differences in α-diversity metrics, principal coordinate analysis (PCoA) based on Aitchison distance showed moderate compositional separation. Permutational multivariate analysis of variance (PERMANOVA) confirmed that disease status was a significant driver of gut microbiota composition (R² = 5.3%, p = 0.002), independent of clinical and lifestyle covariates. Sparse partial least square linear discriminant (sPLS-DA) further identified a set of genera discriminating PD from HC, with Mogibacterium and Rikenellaceae RC9 gut group associated with PD, and several known short-chain fatty acid (SCFA)-producing genera (Fusicatenibacter, Lachnospiraceae UCG-001, Butyricicoccus, Anaerostipes) enriched in HCs. Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) Effect Size (LEfSe) corroborated these findings, confirming the differential abundance of several SCFA-producing genera in the HC group. Our findings reveal distinct microbial signatures associated with PD in a Romanian cohort, marked by a consistent depletion of SCFA-producing bacteria and supports further investigation.
Keywords: Parkinson Disease, gut microbiome, Dopaminergic agonists, Amplicon sequencing, MiSeq, 16S rRNA
Received: 27 Jun 2025; Accepted: 14 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Ilie, Văcărean-Trandafir2, Amărandi, Nita (Ilie), Dobrin, Doroftei, Ivanov, Savuta, Kirov and Doroftei. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Ovidiu Dumitru Ilie, ovidiu.ilie@iuls.ro
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