Gut Microbiome Distinguishes Patients With Epilepsy From Healthy Individuals

Abstract

Objective: The gut microecosystem is the largest microecosystem in the human body and has been proven to be linked to neurological diseases. The main objective of this study was to characterize the fecal microbiome, investigate the differences between epilepsy patients and healthy controls, and evaluate the potential efficacy of the fecal microbiome as a diagnostic tool for epilepsy.Design: We collected 74 fecal samples from epilepsy patients (Eps, n = 24) and healthy controls (HCs, n = 50) in the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University and subjected the samples to 16S rRNA MiSeq sequencing and analysis. We set up a train set and a test set, identified the optimal microbial markers for epilepsy after characterizing the gut microbiome in the former and built a diagnostic model, then validated it in the validation group.Results: There were significant differences in microbial communities between the two groups. The α-diversity of the HCs was higher than that of the epilepsy group, but the Venn diagram showed that there were more unique operational taxonomic unit (OTU) in the epilepsy group. At the phylum level, Proteobacteria and Actinobacteriota increased significantly in Eps, while the relative abundance of Bacteroidota increased in HCs. Compared with HCs, Eps were enriched in 23 genera, including Faecalibacterium, Escherichia-Shigella, Subdoligranulum and Enterobacteriaceae-unclassified. In contrast, 59 genera including Bacteroides, Megamonas, Prevotella, Lachnospiraceae-unclassified and Blautia increased in the HCs. In Spearman correlation analysis, age, WBC, RBC, PLT, ALB, CREA, TBIL, Hb and Urea were positively correlated with most of the different OTUs. Seizure-type, course and frequency are negatively correlated with most of the different OTUs. In addition, twenty-two optimal microbial markers were identified by a fivefold cross-validation of the random forest model. In the established train set and test set, the area under the curve was 0.9771 and 0.993, respectively.Conclusion: Our study was the first to characterize the gut microbiome of Eps and HCs in central China and demonstrate the potential efficacy of microbial markers as a noninvasive biological diagnostic tool for epilepsy.

Altered intestinal microbiota composition with epilepsy and concomitant diarrhea and potential indicator biomarkers in infants

“…Our study also showed that Escherichia/Shigella had the highest relative abundance in ED, but it did not play an important position in the association network. These results relatively differed from those of another study ( Cui et al, 2022 ). Our findings also suggested that intestinal microbiota, such as Bifidobacterium and Escherichia/Shigella , could be used as potential microbial markers to classify possible subtypes of epileptic diseases.…”

“…The gut–brain axis, which is the largest axis, has been recently shown to sense and react to dynamic ecosystem changes by converting microbiota-associated chemical cues from the environment into neuronal impulses, thus implicating a potential role of the gut microbiota in epileptogenesis ( Yue et al, 2022 ). More evidence indicates that gut dysfunction/disorder is closely associated with the onset of and susceptibility to epilepsy, and some specific intestinal flora can function as gut biomarkers ( Gong et al, 2020 ; Cui et al, 2022 ).…”

Integrated Macrogenomics and Metabolomics Explore Alterations and Correlation between Gut Microbiota and Serum Metabolites in Adult Epileptic Patients: A Pilot Study

“…To clarify the role of eukaryotic and viral participation in the emergence of epilepsy, larger samples and additional research are required. Among the prokaryotes, at the phylum level, Proteobacteria and Actinobacteriota were notably increased in the patients with epilepsy compared with the controls, conforming to the findings of a recent study [32]. There were also obvious differences between the epilepsy and control groups at the genus and species level.…”

Faecalibacterium: a bacterial genus with promising human health applications

“…Unexpectedly, an intervention study discovered that autistic children who consumed gluten- and casein-restricted diets were better able to handle autism-related behavioral challenges and had higher Faecalibacterium levels than autistic children who consumed the control diet (Grimaldi et al 2018 ). Members of this genus were found to be more abundant in individuals with epilepsy, although there were no links with severity status (Valles-Colomer et al 2019 , Cui et al 2021 ).…”