Changes in gut microbiota in the acute phase after spinal cord injury correlate with severity of the lesion

Abstract

After spinal cord injury (SCI), patients face many physical and psychological issues including intestinal dysfunction and comorbidities, strongly affecting quality of life. The gut microbiota has recently been suggested to influence the course of the disease in these patients. However, to date only two studies have profiled the gut microbiota in SCI patients, months after a traumatic injury. Here we characterized the gut microbiota in a large Italian SCI population, within a short time from a not only traumatic injury. Feces were collected within the first week at the rehabilitation center (no later than 60 days after SCI), and profiled by 16S rRNA gene-based next-generation sequencing. Microbial profiles were compared to those publicly available of healthy age- and gender-matched Italians, and correlated to patient metadata, including type of SCI, spinal unit location, nutrition and concomitant antibiotic therapies. The gut microbiota of SCI patients shows distinct dysbiotic signatures, i.e. increase in potentially pathogenic, pro-inflammatory and mucus-degrading bacteria, and depletion of short-chain fatty acid producers. While robust to most host variables, such dysbiosis varies by lesion level and completeness, with the most neurologically impaired patients showing an even more unbalanced microbial profile. The SCI-related gut microbiome dysbiosis is very likely secondary to injury and closely related to the degree of completeness and severity of the lesion, regardless of etiology and time interval. This microbial layout could variously contribute to increased gut permeability and inflammation, potentially predisposing patients to the onset of severe comorbidities.

Microbiome composition indicate dysbiosis and lower richness in tumor breast tissues compared to healthy adjacent paired tissue, within the same women

“…The overall quality of reverse reads was lower than that of forward reads for all the sequenced samples and, in this specific case, did not pass the quality filter in dada2 [ 50 ]. To overcome this issue, we applied an approach based on PE reads merging before denoising [ 51 , 52 ]. About 70% of input reads were successfully merged.…”

Gut Microbiota and Acute Central Nervous System Injury: A New Target for Therapeutic Intervention

“…Another clinical study with 54 Turkish participants (41 SCI patients vs. 13 healthy controls) identified that butyrateproducing microbes of the Firmicutes phylum are significantly reduced in SCI patients than healthy controls (108). Recently, Bazzocchi et al investigated a large Italian SCI population acute phase after injury and age-and gender-matched healthy Italians (112). Their study revealed that the abundance of SCI patients' gut microbiota increased in potentially pathogenic, proinflammatory, and mucus-degrading bacteria and decreased in SCFAs producers.…”

Peripheral Immune Dysfunction: A Problem of Central Importance after Spinal Cord Injury

“…Since these groundbreaking studies, there has been an explosion of interest in how gut microbiota are altered after SCI, and how modulation of the gut microbiome might improve both neurological and immunological outcomes for SCI individuals [ 149 , 150 , 151 , 152 , 153 , 154 , 155 , 156 ]. In regard to peripheral immunity, a recent study demonstrated that after a T9 contusive injury in mice, the gut microbiome displayed a reduced Firmicutes to Bacteroidetes phyla ratio as well as an increase in the phylum Proteobacteria that contains Gram-negative bacteria that produce the endotoxin LPS, which is associated with systemic inflammation [ 157 ].…”