Multiple sclerosis patients have a distinct gut microbiota compared to healthy controls

By Jun Chen, N. Chia, Krishna Rani Kalari, Janet Z. Yao, M. Novotná, M. P. Soldán, David H. Luckey, E. Marietta, P. Jeraldo, Xianfeng Chen and 6 more. Scientific Reports, 2016

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Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an immune-mediated disease, the etiology of which involves both genetic and environmental factors. The exact nature of the environmental factors responsible for predisposition to MS remains elusive; however, it’s hypothesized that gastrointestinal microbiota might play an important role in pathogenesis of MS. Therefore, this study was designed to investigate whether gut microbiota are altered in MS by comparing the fecal microbiota in relapsing remitting MS (RRMS) (n = 31) patients to that of age- and gender-matched healthy controls (n = 36). Phylotype profiles of the gut microbial populations were generated using hypervariable tag sequencing of the V3–V5 region of the 16S ribosomal RNA gene. Detailed fecal microbiome analyses revealed that MS patients had distinct microbial community profile compared to healthy controls. We observed an increased abundance of Psuedomonas, Mycoplana, Haemophilus, Blautia, and Dorea genera in MS patients, whereas control group showed increased abundance of Parabacteroides, Adlercreutzia and Prevotella genera. Thus our study is consistent with the hypothesis that MS patients have gut microbial dysbiosis and further study is needed to better understand their role in the etiopathogenesis of MS.

Subfields: Epidemiology, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1658c9f3e9c793efe3808fe834adf0e728cf4c66

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Citations in the corpus

Gut bacteria from multiple sclerosis patients modulate human T cells and exacerbate symptoms in mouse models (2017, background): “MS-like symptoms in EAE can be exacerbated by Th1 and Th17 responses and modulated by Tregs (15, 16).”
The Role of Short-Chain Fatty Acids From Gut Microbiota in Gut-Brain Communication (2020, background): “Among its etiological factors, the imbalance between pro and anti-inflammatory cells in the immune system seems to play an important role, which is highly affected by the gut microbiota composition and can be aggravated by dysbiosis (104, 176, 177).”