Potential Role of Gut Microbiota in ALS Pathogenesis and Possible Novel Therapeutic Strategies

Abstract

Our preliminary results confirm that there is a difference in the microbiota profile in ALS patients.

Antibiotics use and risk of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in Sweden

“…In the study conducted by Mazzini et al . , researchers studied 50 ALS patients and 50 age, sex and country of origin matched healthy controls, whereas the studies by Brenner et al . , Fang et al .…”

“…The conflicting findings from human studies are probably due to different methodological limitations. In the study conducted by Mazzini et al [6], researchers studied 50 ALS patients and 50 age, sex and country of origin matched healthy controls, whereas the studies by Brenner et al [7], Fang et al [5] and Rowin et al [3] enrolled only 25, six and five ALS patients, respectively. The relatively small sample sizes involved in these studies might have precluded the possibility of detecting real differences.…”

“…Findings from human studies are conflicting, however. Low diversity of gut microbiota [3,4] and altered composition of microorganisms [5,6] have been suggested in ALS patients in some studies, although a recent study did not observe a substantial alteration of gut microbiota composition when comparing 25 ALS patients with 32 age and sex matched healthy controls [7].…”

Fecal Microbiota Transplantation in Neurological Disorders

“…Several studies suggest an important role of the gut microbiota in the pathophysiology of neurological disorders. A different human gut microbiota composition compared to healthy controls has been reported for several neurological disorders, such as Parkinson's disease (Hasegawa et al, 2015;Keshavarzian et al, 2015;Scheperjans et al, 2015;Unger et al, 2016), multiple sclerosis (Miyake et al, 2015;Chen et al, 2016;Jangi et al, 2016;Cosorich et al, 2017), autism spectrum disorder (Finegold et al, 2002(Finegold et al, , 2010De Angelis et al, 2013Kang et al, 2013;Ma et al, 2019), Alzheimer's disease (Vogt et al, 2017;Zhuang et al, 2018;Haran et al, 2019;Li B. et al, 2019;Liu et al, 2019), neuromyelitis optica (Cree et al, 2016), Rett syndrome (Strati et al, 2016), epilepsy (Xie et al, 2017;Peng et al, 2018;Lindefeldt et al, 2019), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Fang et al, 2016;Rowin et al, 2017;Mazzini et al, 2018), cerebral infarction (Karlsson et al, 2012;Yin et al, 2015), spinal cord injury (Gungor et al, 2016), and multiple system atrophy (Tan et al, 2018). However, data on microbiota composition are frequently inconsistent and numerous potential confounders are involved.…”

Bottoms up: the role of gut microbiota in brain health

“…Atrophy " Bacteroides " Proteobacteria; # Prevotella (Engen et al, 2017;Tan et al, 2018) Alzheimer's Disease Insufficient studies to date " Ruminococcaceae, Enterococcaceae, Lactobaccillaceae; # Firmicutes, Bifidobacterium, Lachnospiraceae (Vogt et al, 2017;Zhuang et al, 2018) Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Insufficient studies to date; note that 2 of 3 studies found little evidence of dysbiosis " Dorea; # Oscillibacter, Anaerostipes, Lachnospira Brenner et al, 2018;Mazzini et al, 2018) Multiple Sclerosis " Akkermansia, # beneficial Clostridial clusters Several other taxa. (Miyake et al, 2015;Chen et al, 2016a;Tremlett et al, 2016;Berer et al, 2017;Cekanaviciute et al, 2017)…”