Spectral flow and variational bifurcation

We show that the principle "nonvanishing of spectral flow of the linearization along the trivial branch entails bifurcation of nontrivial solutions ", proved in \cite{FPR} for critical points of one parameter families of $C^2$ functionals with Fredholm Hessian, holds true for variational perturbations of paths of unbounded self-adjoint Fredholm operators with a fixed domain.