Alterations of Oral Microbiota in Chinese Patients With Esophageal Cancer.

Qiaofei Zhao,Chunfen Zhang,Yu Zhang,Tian Yang,Hongwei Chen,Jing Yang,Hongli Xiao,Yifan Yan,Yanli Xia,Baoyong Wang,Hongfeng Han,Youchun Wang,Weihong Xue,Zhibin Li,Hongyi Zhao

doi:10.3389/fcimb.2020.541144

Abstract

Emerging evidence supports that oral microbiota are associated with health and diseases of the esophagus. How oral microbiota change in Chinese patients with esophageal cancer (EC) is unknown, neither is their biomarker role. For an objective to understand alterations of oral microbiota in Chinese EC patients, we conducted a case-control study including saliva samples from 39 EC patients and 51 healthy volunteers. 16S rDNA genes of V3-V4 variable regions were sequenced to identify taxon. Relationship between oral flora and disease was analyzed according to alpha diversity and beta diversity. Resultantly, the Shannon index (p = 0.2) and the Simpson diversity index (p = 0.071) were not significant between the two groups. Yet we still found several species different in abundance between the two groups. For the EC group, the most significantly increased taxa were Firmicutes, Negativicutes, Selenomonadales, Prevotellaceae, Prevotella, and Veillonellaceae, while the most significantly decreased taxa were Proteobacteria, Betaproteobacteria, Neisseriales, Neisseriaceae, and Neisseria. In conclusion, there are significant alterations in abundance of some oral microbiomes between the EC patients and the healthy controls in the studied Chinese participants, which may be meaningful for predicting the development of EC, and the potential roles of these species in EC development deserve further studies.

Highlights

Esophageal cancer (EC) ranks the eighth in the most common cancers among the world (Bollschweiler et al, 2017; Short et al, 2017; Huang and Yu, 2018)
The esophagus is so close to the mouth that we propose that the oral microbiota may be related to esophageal diseases, such as esophageal cancer (EC) and reflux esophagitis
There was no difference in smoking and drinking between the two groups, which seemed inconsistent with previous studies (Schueller et al, 2017; Fan et al, 2018; Hsiao et al, 2018)

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Esophageal cancer (EC) ranks the eighth in the most common cancers among the world (Bollschweiler et al, 2017; Short et al, 2017; Huang and Yu, 2018). The most commonly seen in Asia and Africa was esophageal squamous cell cancer, while in North America and Europe, the major type is esophageal adenocarcinoma (EAC) (Short et al, 2017; Huang and Yu, 2018). Given that saliva samples are easy to collect, and high-throughput nextgeneration sequencing is widely used in detecting, identifying, and classifying microorganism (Sanschagrin and Yergeau, 2014; Xun et al, 2018), we conducted a case-control study to analyze the differences of oral microbiota in the composition of EC patients, intending to help developing new, non-invasive, and effective detections for early EC. Alpha diversity indices with significant differences under different conditions were screened by rank sum test (using Wilcoxon test function in R). Beta diversity analysis was used to compare differences in species diversity among samples. All p-values were adjusted by false discovery rate (FDR) test

RESULTS

DISCUSSION

CONCLUSION

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT