Article Text
Abstract
Introduction Despite strong evidence that maturation patterns of the gut microbiome in early life influence the risk for childhood asthma, very little is known about gut microbiota patterns in adults with established asthma, and of greater interest relationships to phenotypic features that characterise asthma heterogeneity.
Methods Fifty-eight faecal samples from 32 adults with (n=24) and without (n=8) asthma were analysed using 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequencing methods to characterise intestinal bacterial composition. Compositional stability of paired samples was evaluated and features of gut bacterial community structure analysed in relation to extensive clinical characterisation data collected from subjects, who were enrolled in a prospective observational cohort study at the University of Michigan.
Results Differences in gut bacterial community structure were associated with aeroallergen sensitisation and lung function as assessed by forced expiratory volume in 1 s (FEV1) %predicted. Associations with FEV1 were consistently observed across independent analytic approaches. k-means clustering of the gut microbiota data in subjects with asthma revealed three different clusters, distinguished most strongly by FEV1 (p<0.05) and trends in differences in other clinical and inflammatory features.
Conclusion In this pilot study of asthmatic and non-asthmatic subjects, significant relationships between gut microbiota composition, aeroallergen sensitisation and lung function were observed. These preliminary findings merit further study in larger cohorts to explore possible mechanistic links to asthma phenotype.
- gut microbiome
- adult asthma
- phenotype
- lung function
- 16S rRNA
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Footnotes
Contributors Study design: YJH, KR. Subject recruitment, sample processing, clinical data collection and analysis: LB, AB, ON, KR, YJH. Microbiota data analysis: LB, SM, KO, JRE-D, YJH. Data interpretation and manuscript writing/review: all authors.
Funding Research supported by the NIAID (R01AI129958) (YJH), the University of Michigan Host-Microbiome Initiative, and the Michigan Institute for Clinical and Health Research (UL1TR000433).
Competing interests None declared.
Patient consent Not required.
Ethics approval The study was approved by the University of Michigan Institutional Review Board.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data sharing statement Sequence data are deposited under BioProject ID PRJNA474717.