Reduced Incidence of Prevotella and Other Fermenters in Intestinal Microflora of Autistic Children

By Dae-Wook Kang, Jin G. Park, Z. Ilhan, G. Wallstrom, J. LaBaer, J. Adams, Rosa Krajmalnik-Brown. PLoS ONE, 2013

932 citations recorded by the source corpus.

High proportions of autistic children suffer from gastrointestinal (GI) disorders, implying a link between autism and abnormalities in gut microbial functions. Increasing evidence from recent high-throughput sequencing analyses indicates that disturbances in composition and diversity of gut microbiome are associated with various disease conditions. However, microbiome-level studies on autism are limited and mostly focused on pathogenic bacteria. Therefore, here we aimed to define systemic changes in gut microbiome associated with autism and autism-related GI problems. We recruited 20 neurotypical and 20 autistic children accompanied by a survey of both autistic severity and GI symptoms. By pyrosequencing the V2/V3 regions in bacterial 16S rDNA from fecal DNA samples, we compared gut microbiomes of GI symptom-free neurotypical children with those of autistic children mostly presenting GI symptoms. Unexpectedly, the presence of autistic symptoms, rather than the severity of GI symptoms, was associated with less diverse gut microbiomes. Further, rigorous statistical tests with multiple testing corrections showed significantly lower abundances of the genera Prevotella, Coprococcus, and unclassified Veillonellaceae in autistic samples. These are intriguingly versatile carbohydrate-degrading and/or fermenting bacteria, suggesting a potential influence of unusual diet patterns observed in autistic children. However, multivariate analyses showed that autism-related changes in both overall diversity and individual genus abundances were correlated with the presence of autistic symptoms but not with their diet patterns. Taken together, autism and accompanying GI symptoms were characterized by distinct and less diverse gut microbial compositions with lower levels of Prevotella, Coprococcus, and unclassified Veillonellaceae.

Subfields: Molecular Biology, Nutrition and Dietetics, Psychiatry and Mental health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4c283a3c5e9db99720830a94a8eb06457130c459

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Citations in the corpus

Gut microbiota are related to Parkinson's disease and clinical phenotype (2015, background): “However, low Prevotellaceae levels do not seem to be specific for PD, because they have been reported in patients with autism and type 1 diabetes.(61,71) Based on these observations, high fecal abundance of Prevotellaceae could be a useful biomarker to exclude PD.”
Human Gut Microbiota from Autism Spectrum Disorder Promote Behavioral Symptoms in Mice (2019, methodology): “…co-morbid GI dysfunction, differ from that of TD controls (Coretti et al., 2018; De Angelis et al., 2013; Finegold et al., 2010; Gondalia et al., 2012; Kang et al., 2013, 2018; Kushak et al., 2017; Liu et al., 2019; Son et al., 2015; Strati et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2019; Williams et al., 2011).”
The Hologenome Concept: Human, Animal and Plant Microbiota (2014, background): “Interestingly, autism and accompanying GI symptoms were characterized by distinct and less diverse gut-microbial compositions with lower abundances of the genera Prevotella, Coprococcus, and Veillonellaceae (Kang et al. 2013).”
Waste Not, Want Not: Why Rarefying Microbiome Data Is Inadmissible (2013, neutral): “…of “rarefying to even sampling depth” as a standard normalization procedure appears to explain why rareﬁed counts are also used in studies that attempt to detect differential abundance of OTUs between prede-ﬁned classes of samples [33–37], in addition to studies that use proportions directly [38].”
The Central Nervous System and the Gut Microbiome (2016, background): “Moreover, Kang et al. (2013) reported the absence of specific probiotic members of the community such as Prevotella from the ASD gut bacterial population, suggesting that augmenting the microbiome with a specific microbe may be beneficial.”
The role of microbiome in central nervous system disorders (2013, neutral): “The role of microbiom dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bbi.2013.12.015 Alcaligenaceae family, were correlated with autism (Adams et al., 2011; Kang et al., 2013; Wang et al., 2013; Williams et al., 2012).”
New evidences on the altered gut microbiota in autism spectrum disorders (2017, result): “5% NT), in agreement with a previous study on the gut microbiota in ASD children [28] although this difference of relative abundance was not supported by the statistical analysis.”
The microbiota modulates gut physiology and behavioral abnormalities associated with autism (2013, neutral): “, 2010) and microbiome alterations (Adams et al., 2011; Finegold et al., 2010; Finegold et al., 2012; Kang et al., 2013; Parracho et al., 2005; Williams et al., 2011; Williams et al., 2012) are reported in several independent studies of ASD; however, these findings are challenged by some reports of ”
Microbiota Transfer Therapy alters gut ecosystem and improves gastrointestinal and autism symptoms: an open-label study (2017, methodology): “underrepresented in children with ASD [7, 21, 66], also observed in this study at baseline (two-tailed MannWhitney U test p < 0.”