Growing evidence links gut microbiota dysbiosis to neurodegenerative diseases (NDs) such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, yet the field remains dominated by correlational observations rather than experimentally validated causal mechanisms. In this hypothesis-generating Perspective, we propose that causal inference in microbiota-associated neurodegeneration may be strengthened by combining two complementary lenses: evolutionary biomedicine and microbial metabolism. Because evolutionary information carries intrinsic temporal and causal structure, it can provide biological prior knowledge for inferring causal mechanisms of diseases. Human Accelerated Regions (HARs), genomic loci conserved across mammals but rapidly divergent in the human lineage, offer an anchor for identifying human-specific host–microbe co-evolutionary units relevant to NDs. We further hypothesize that microbial metabolites represent one class of mechanistically testable intermediates linking host genetic background, gut microbial ecology, and neurodegenerative phenotypes. This integrated evolutionary-metabolic perspective offers a tractable path from correlation toward mechanism in gut microbiota–ND research.
Tang et al. (Mon,) studied this question.