Airway Microbiota and Bronchial Hyperresponsiveness in Patients with Sub-optimally Controlled Asthma

By Yvonne J. Huang, Craig E. Nelson, Eoin L. Brodie, Todd Z. DeSantis, Marshall S. Baek, Jane T. Liu, Tanja Woyke, M. Allgaier, J. Bristow, J. Wiener‐Kronish and 14 more. Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, 2010

683 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background Improvement in lung function following macrolide antibiotic therapy has been attributed to reduction in bronchial infection due to specific bacteria. However, the airway may be populated by a more diverse microbiota, and clinical features of asthma may be associated with characteristics of the airway microbiota present. Objective To determine if relationships exist between the composition of the airway bacterial microbiota and clinical features of asthma, using culture-independent tools capable of detecting the presence and relative abundance of most known bacteria. Methods In this pilot study, bronchial epithelial brushings were collected from sixty-five adults with sub-optimally controlled asthma participating in a multicenter study of the effects of clarithromycin on asthma control, and ten healthy subjects. A combination of high-density 16S rRNA microarray and parallel clone library-sequencing analysis was used to profile the microbiota and examine relationships with clinical measurements. Results Compared to controls, 16S rRNA amplicon concentrations (a proxy for bacterial burden) and bacterial diversity were significantly higher among asthmatic patients. In multivariate analyses, airway microbiota composition and diversity were significantly correlated with bronchial hyperresponsiveness. Specifically, the relative abundance of particular phylotypes, including members of the Comamonadaceae, Sphingomonadaceae, Oxalobacteraceae and other bacterial families, were highly correlated with the degree of bronchial hyperresponsiveness. Conclusion The composition of bronchial airway microbiota is associated with the degree of bronchial hyperresponsiveness among patients with sub-optimally controlled asthma. These findings support the need for further functional studies to examine the potential contribution of members of the airway microbiota in asthma pathogenesis.

Subfields: Endocrinology, Molecular Biology

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Citations in the corpus

Microbiota in health and diseases (2022, background): “In asthma patients, Proteobacteria has been associated with hyper-responsiveness and Th17/IL-17mediated inflammation.(197) H.”
The Microbiome and the Respiratory Tract (2015, background): “Adult asthmatics, even at clinical baseline (4, 76) and without treatment (78), exhibit altered lower respiratory tract microbiota, typically with increased community diversity and enrichment with members of the Proteobacteria phylum.”
Analysis of the Upper Respiratory Tract Microbiotas as the Source of the Lung and Gastric Microbiotas in Healthy Individuals (2015, background): “During states of ill health, such as viral upper respiratory tract infections, allergies, or sinus infections, the liquid flow from the nasal cavity increases, and this clearly has the potential to affect the lung microbiome, consistent with studies of rhinovirus infection and asthmatics that highli”
Prediction of Drug Combinations by Integrating Molecular and Pharmacological Data (2011, background): “Recently, the composition of microbiota from the bronchial epithelium was found to be associated with asthma pathogenesis [26].”