Glutathione Found Low in Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s–How the Body Heals the Mind | Joseph Maroon MD

At age 41, from the heights of career success as a brain surgeon, Dr. Joseph Maroon’s life was reduced to flipping burgers at a gas station, becoming overweight, and getting divorced. Yet had it been otherwise, he may not now be blazing a trail in the search for a cure for Parkinson’s disease. 

Maroon, now 84, attributes a string of life crises, including the sudden loss of his 60-year-old father, to bringing his life to a standstill over four decades ago. 

“I went from literally doing awake brain surgery on patients with tumors in eloquent parts of the brain to working in a dilapidated truck stop that my father, heavily mortgaged, bequeathed to my mother.”

Suffering this “life quake,” as Maroon terms it, prompted a fierce realignment of priorities away from career success towards health, faith, and family. Recovering mental health, he says, was a result of nurturing physical health.

What started as running four reluctant laps around a high school track led to triathlons, and eventually Ironman competitions. 

The eight-time Ironman athlete’s focus is now trained on what replenishing a key brain chemical can do to relieve Parkinson’s disease:

“We’ve been able to show in peer-reviewed journals that in Alzheimer’s and in Parkinson’s disease there’s a deficiency of glutathione in specific areas of the brain that are related to the neuropathology that occurs in these diseases.”

Through a $300,000 grant, Maroon and co-researcher Pravat Kumar Mandal will expand their glutathione research to include Navy Seals, retired special warfare combatant-craft crewmen, and retired NFL players—a cohort exposed to extraordinary head trauma and more prone to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

Alongside examining their levels of glutathione deficiency, Mandal and Maroon will examine the microbiomes of the participants.

“People who have a non-healthy microbiome are more subject to depressive episodes,” said Maroon.

“There’s a huge gut-brain connection in mental health, disease, and depression.”

After baseline testing of memory, attention, and ability to process information, the cohort will be given gamma-glutamylcysteine—a compound considered capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier to increase glutathione.

Their brain function will be re-examined after a year to gauge the compound’s potential to counter neurodegenerative disease. 

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————————————————————————————————————————————————Read Dr. Maroon’s Square One: A Simple Guide to a Balanced Life.

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Referenced studies:

Oral administration of γ-glutamylcysteine increases intracellular glutathione levels above homeostasis in a randomised human trial pilot study – PMC

Oxidative Stress Occurs Prior to Amyloid Aβ Plaque Formation and Tau Phosphorylation in Alzheimer’s Disease: Role of Glutathione and Metal Ions | ACS Chemical Neuroscience

Blood Biomarkers in Alzheimer’s Disease | ACS Chemical Neuroscience

Brain oxidative stress: Detection and mapping of anti-oxidant marker ‘Glutathione’ in different brain regions of healthy male/female, MCI and Alzheimer patients using non-invasive magnetic resonance spectroscopy – ScienceDirect

Age-associated temporal decline in butyrate-producing bacteria plays a key pathogenic role in the onset and progression of neuropathology and memory deficits in 3×Tg-AD mice

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