Abstract
Health and demographic surveillance system (HDSS) is a population-based health and vital event registration system that monitors demographic and health events in a geographically defined population at regular intervals. Human microbiome research in the past decade has been the field of increasingly intense research much due to its demonstrated impact upon various health conditions including human chronic airway diseases such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Many confounding factors have been revealed to play a role in shaping the microbiome in chronic airway diseases. Asthma and COPD follows a typical pattern of disease progression, which includes stable and exacerbation state in which the microbiota is known to vary. However, many such studies lack extensive and longitudinal sampling with inadequate metadata, which has resulted in the inconsistencies in the observations. HDSS provides such a platform, which can offer a deeper understanding of the role of the microbiome in human health. In this review, we highlight opportunities and limitations in microbiome research with the help of studies conducted on chronic airway diseases like asthma and COPD. In addition, we also emphasize on the benefits of HDSS and future directions in lung microbiome research.
Highlights
Health and demographic surveillance system (HDSS) is a population-based health and vital event registration system that collects and monitors demographic and health events information in a geographically defined population at regular intervals [1]
We discuss microbiome studies on chronic airway diseases like asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) to understand how HDSS can aid in human microbiome research
The majority of the studies conducted in asthma and COPD population explored microbiota by amplifying 16S rRNA gene by PCR followed by high throughput sequencing [10, 11, 33,34,35,36, 40, 43,44,45,46,47,48, 52, 55, 56, 60,61,62]
Summary
Health and demographic surveillance system (HDSS) is a population-based health and vital event registration system that collects and monitors demographic and health events information in a geographically defined population at regular intervals [1]. We discuss microbiome studies on chronic airway diseases like asthma and COPD to understand how HDSS can aid in human microbiome research. The existence of abundant and diverse microbiota in airways suggests that they can modulate airway function and immunological responses [31, 32] In this context, members of phylum Proteobacteria like Haemophilus spp., Tropheryma whipplei, Moraxella catarrhalis, and Neisseria spp. have shown a strong correlation between the presence of asthma and its exacerbations [28, 33, 34]. It was learned from above studies that it is difficult to discriminate between resident and transient microbes, studies discussed here do not give the real picture of the microbes associated with a disease condition This could be because many intrinsic and extrinsic factors are known to play a key role in shaping the microbiome, which necessitates collection and analysis of relevant metadata to understand their effect on the microbiome. Disease-specific cohorts are available in COPD, no comprehensive longitudinal study considering genetic factors and other related metadata is available
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