Statistical analysis
bloating, gastrointestinal symptoms, PD motor symptoms, diarrhea, PD
DISEASE
Demographics, including age, sex, PD treatment status, UPDRS, H&Y stage, and disease duration were summarized using descriptive statistics. The outcomes for this proof-of-concept study were tolerability and feasibility, safety and gastrointestinal symptoms, and biological outcomes. This study was not powered to assess PD motor symptoms. Changes in gastrointestinal symptoms and side effects (e.g., bloating, diarrhea) from baseline to after the prebiotic intervention were assessed with a two-tailed, paired Microbial profiling of fermented stool samples using 16 S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing and SCFA data analysis was performed as follows. Demultiplexed and preprocessed 16 S rRNA gene sequence reads were supplied as raw paired-end FASTQ sequence files. The raw files were imported and processed using the software package QIIME2Separately, analysis of stool microbiome shotgun metagenome sequence data from PD participants was performed. Analyses of alpha- and beta-diversity were used to examine changes in microbial community structure between baseline and after the prebiotic intervention. Subgroup analysis of newly diagnosed, non-medicated, and treated PD participants were also performed. Alpha-diversity metrics (i.e., Shannon index, Simpson’s index, richness, and evenness) were calculated from rarefied datasets (1 million sequences/sample) at the taxonomic level of species. Group comparisons were performed with a two-tailed, Wilcoxon signed-rank paired test in GraphPad Prism (v9.0, GraphPad Software LLC, San Diego, CA). Permutation Multivariate Analysis of Variance (PERMANOVA)