Oral-gut connection: How pathogenic oral microbes could trigger gastric cancer
Pathogenic microbes linked to gastric cancer may be found in the oral cavity.
In a study published in Cell Reports Medicine, researchers performed a comprehensive gut and oral shotgun metagenomic analysis using the data of more than 300 participants in Harbin, China, to examine the relationship between the oral and gut microbiomes, microbiome dysbiosis and gastric cancer.
The researchers found that the samples from participants with gastric cancer exhibited an enrichment of 20 microbes — including Streptococcus and Lactobacillus species —in the gut microbiome but not the oral microbiome. Following a strain-level analysis of saliva-stool metagenomes, they noted that gastric cancer-enriched Streptococcus species originated in the oral cavity and were transmitted to the gut microbiome. Functional analysis suggested lactic acid bacteria dominance as a result of the enrichment of lactate fermentation pathways in the stool samples of patients with gastric cancer. Further, Streptococcus and Lactobacillus species as well as other lactic acid bacteria demonstrated polymicrobial synergy in the formation of co-abundance networks across the oral and gut microbiomes, thereby increasing the risk of carcinogenesis.
Because of the high accuracy achieved on microbiome-based classifiers, the researchers hope their findings can have clinical applications in improving the identification of gastric cancer. They emphasized the role of the oral-gut axis in the disease.
Read more: Cell Reports Medicine
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