Overview

• An international analysis published in Science Advances reports that persistent intestinal conditions are associated with increased likelihood of later Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, reaching roughly twofold risk in some groups over 5–15 year windows.
• Non‑infectious colitis, gastritis, esophagitis, and functional intestinal disorders such as irritable bowel syndrome and chronic constipation or diarrhea showed the strongest associations.
• Researchers combined about half a million health records from UK Biobank, SAIL, and FinnGen with genetic data from more than 487,000 people and proteomic profiles from over 52,000.
• Polygenic risk scores were lower among individuals with gastrointestinal comorbidities, indicating meaningful non‑genetic contributions to disease risk.
• The team released an open interactive resource to explore comorbidity–risk links, and they emphasize that the results are observational and point to earlier monitoring and gut‑focused prevention research.