Tongue coating microbiome as a potential biomarker for gastritis including precancerous cascade

Jiaxing Cui,Yingxue Li,Xuegong Zhang,Hongfei Cui,Shiyu Du,Shao Li,Junfeng Li,Mingran Yang,Liyang Liu

doi:10.1007/s13238-018-0596-6

Jiaxing Cui, Yingxue Li + Show 7 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s13238-018-0596-6

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Abstract

The development of gastritis is associated with an increased risk of gastric cancer. Current invasive gastritis diagnostic methods are not suitable for monitoring progress. In this work based on 78 gastritis patients and 50 healthy individuals, we observed that the variation of tongue-coating microbiota was associated with the occurrence and development of gastritis. Twenty-one microbial species were identified for differentiating tongue-coating microbiomes of gastritis and healthy individuals. Pathways such as microbial metabolism in diverse environments, biosynthesis of antibiotics and bacterial chemotaxis were up-regulated in gastritis patients. The abundance of Campylobacter concisus was found associated with the gastric precancerous cascade. Furthermore, Campylobacter concisus could be detected in tongue coating and gastric fluid in a validation cohort containing 38 gastritis patients. These observations provided biological evidence of tongue diagnosis in traditional Chinese medicine, and indicated that tongue-coating microbiome could be a potential non-invasive biomarker, which might be suitable for long-term monitoring of gastritis.

Highlights

Gastritis, which is a worldwide problem, is defined as an inflamed condition of the gastric mucosa (Price, 1991; Stolte and Meining, 2001; Owen, 2003; Rugge et al, 2007)
Gastritis patients were divided into 3 groups according to gastric precancerous cascade, including superficial gastritis, atrophic gastritis and intestinal metaplasia, based on histopathology
After comparing the genes annotated to Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) between normal controls and gastritis patients by Wilcoxon rank-sum test followed by FDR correction, we found that 878 genes were significantly different between normal controls and gastritis patients (P < 0.05)

Summary

Introduction

Gastritis, which is a worldwide problem, is defined as an inflamed condition of the gastric mucosa (Price, 1991; Stolte and Meining, 2001; Owen, 2003; Rugge et al, 2007). Long-term studies have confirmed that the development of gastritis increases the risk of gastric cancer (Sipponen et al, 1985; Filipe et al, 1994; Miehlke et al, 1998; Meining et al, 2002; Ohata et al, 2004; Song et al, 2015). Gastritis diagnosis in clinical practice relies primarily on endoscopy and histological examination (Dixon et al, 1996; Rugge et al, 2007), which are invasive procedures that cannot be done frequently. It is important to find biomarkers associated with the occurrence and development of gastritis

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