Comparative study of vulva and abdominal skin microbiota of healthy females with high and average BMI

Abstract

BackgroundObesity is known to modulate human health in a number of ways including altering the microbiome of the gut. Very few studies have examined the how obesity may affect the microbiomes of sites distant to the gut. We hypothesized that vulva and abdominal skin may be especially susceptible to body mass index (BMI)-induced alterations in biophysical properties and the microbiome due increased maceration and skin folds at those sites. The aim of this study was to determine if high BMI (≥30) was associated with alterations in the biophysical properties and microbiomes of vulva and abdominal skin.ResultsThe vulvar microbial communities of healthy reproductive-aged females were examined using 16S rRNA sequencing techniques. Our results show that vulvar pH of women with high body mass index (BMI) was statistically higher than that of women with average BMI. Phylogenetic analysis of the vulvar microbiota indicated that women with average BMI have a predominately Lactobacillus-dominated flora, whereas women with high BMI and higher pH were predominately colonized by Finegoldia and Corynebacterium. This BMI-associated shift in microbiota was not observed in samples collected from the exposed skin around the belly, indicating the effect is not global.ConclusionThese results indicate that physiological changes associated with changes in BMI may modulate the vulva microbiome.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s12866-019-1391-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Toward Standards in Clinical Microbiota Studies: Comparison of Three DNA Extraction Methods and Two Bioinformatic Pipelines

“…In general, the vulvar microbiota has not been extensively studied. A recent study on vulvar microbiota observed that Lactobacillus, Corynebacterium, Finegoldia, Staphylococcus, and Anaerococcus are most abundant on this body site, but the use of negative controls was not reported (42). These genera are also part of the vaginal microbiota and might be sampling contamination or reflect high similarity between vulvar and vaginal microbiota.…”

Toward standards in clinical microbiome studies: comparison of three DNA extraction methods and two bioinformatic pipelines

“…In general, the vulvar microbiome has not been extensively studied. A recent study on vulvar microbiome observed that Lactobacillus , Corynebacterium , Finegoldia , Staphylococcus and Anaerococcus are most abundant on this body site, but the use of negative controls was not reported (50). These genera are also part of the vaginal microbiota, and might be sampling contamination or reflect high similarity between vulvar and vaginal microbiota.…”

Microbiome in Healthy Women Between Two Districts With Different Air Quality Index

“…We also investigated the association between relevant clinical parameters with facial bacterial microbiome. As one important parameter, BMI was related with alternation in oral and vulva microbiome (Vongsa et al, 2019;de Andrade et al, 2020). A positive correlation between oral bacterial community with increased BMI was found by fingerprint analysis (de Andrade et al, 2020).…”

“…The main air pollutants are mainly composed of particulate matter (PM 2.5 or PM 10 ), sulfur dioxide (SO 2 ), nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ), ozone (O 3 ), and carbon monoxide (CO; Araviiskaia et al, 2019), and they are also five major pollution standards to calculate the AQI (Woodall et al, 2017). It was reported that accumulation of SO 2 and NO x could result in a lower pH value of rainwater (Li et al, 2019), and difference of pH would further lead to composition change in local microbiota (Vongsa et al, 2019). Available evidence indicate that long-term air pollution could accelerate skin aging (Vierktter et al, 2010;Ding et al, 2017), and some human skin diseases, such as acne (Liu et al, 2018), atopic dermatitis (AD; Ahn, 2014), and eczema (Pesce et al, 2015), were also reported to be associated with dysbiosis of skin microbiota (Fitz-Gibbon et al, 2013;Chng et al, 2016;Dybboe et al, 2017;Shibagaki et al, 2017;Kim et al, 2019;Reiger et al, 2020).…”

“…One host factor, body mass index (BMI), was reported to be closely related to oral or vulva microbiota (Vongsa et al, 2019; de Andrade et al, 2020) besides gut microbiota (Ottosson et al, 2018). In addition, age also would impact the facial microbiome (Kim et al, 2019).…”