Chronic fatigue syndrome patients have alterations in their oral microbiome composition and function, 2018, Wang et al

Chronic fatigue syndrome patients have alterations in their oral microbiome composition and function

• Taiwu Wang ,
• Lei Yu ,
• Cong Xu,
• Keli Pan,
• Minglu Mo,
• Mingxiang Duan,
• Yao Zhang ,
• Hongyan Xiong

• Published: September 11, 2018
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0203503

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0203503

 

Do they know it leads to shifts in functional metabolic pathways? This is different from saying it’s associated. Could altered metabolic pathways lead to altered microbiome? Eg mitochondrial dysfunction leading to impaired immunity leading to altered microbiome, or altered response to glucose altering bacteria diet in mouth/gut leading to different microbiome composition?

 

Prevolella looks interesting

 

Apart from anything re oral microbiome this seems interesting re metabolomics too

@JaimeS do you have any thoughts? What else has this research group done?

 

Would it be relatively easy to process oral microbiome samples compared to [poop emoticon]?

 

So are they saying controls who had similar microbiome also had similar metabolomics? That might indicate certain bacteria are causing problems. But then the controls presumably don’t have symptoms so does it indicate that?! Perhaps the microbiome and KEGG pathway results are both red herrings?

Referring to the bigger effect in ME gut studies (not oral)

So cultural/regional differences in the nature of the differences but with same symptoms might infer microbiome differences are downstream of the root cause depending on diet?

 

But We don’t think HIV is caused by microbiome issues, so this seems more indication that this is something that can happen as a consequence of altered immune function not suggesting it’s key to CFS pathogenesis?

 

I’d say these are subtyping factors rather than confounding factors and may contain the most important information. Eg what would this look like split pre and post 3 year duration?

It would be great if researchers consistently subgrouped by these factors, instead of just listing the limitation (it doesn’t seem like this would take substantially more time and money and could result in important, extra publications from the same project).

 

Merged thread

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0203503

the overall microbiome composition was different (MANOVA, p < 0.01). CFS patients had a higher relative abundance of Fusobacteria compared with healthy controls. Further, the genera Leptotrichia, Prevotella, and Fusobacterium were enriched and Haemophilus, Veillonella, and Porphyromonas were depleted in CFS patients compared to healthy controls. Functional analysis from inferred metagenomes showed that bacterial genera altered in CFS patients were primarily associated with amino acid and energy metabolism.

 

I go for a consequence of altered immune function.

 

Fukuda criteria.

I'd be surprised if it's not similar and they're not measuring the same thing so not really interchangeable.

 

I get the impression they were hoping to have results strong enough to find a biomarker. I was wondering if this was partly because it’s easier/cheaper to get oral samples than testing gut microbiome?

 

Innnnteresting but my brain is fried from every US institution (except for u, NIH) exploding on us all at once. #MEAction is working HARD.

So all I can say for now is... I'll look at it for the research roundup?

 

This is going to be in the double-month research roundup which will be released today (and go out in social media tomorrow).

I don't recognize any of the names here, though.

 

I would say it's rather chicken and egg still.

 

I don't think this study found something robust. They themselves highlight that differences were minor...

It's exciting though to have a Chinese research team studying mecfs. Lets hope they will stick around!