Topic modeling of neuropsychiatric diseases related to gut microbiota and gut brain axis using artificial intelligence based BERTopic model on PubMed abstracts

Abstract

Gut microbiota play a crucial role in complex interactions of the gut brain axis between the gastrointestinal system and the central nervous system. The intricate network of bidirectional communication between the gut and brain, mediated through neural, hormonal, and immunological pathways, known as the gut-brain axis, has been implicated in the pathophysiology of several mental, neurological and behavioral disorders. Alterations in the gut microbiota composition, or dysbiosis, have been associated with disorders like Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, Multiple Sclerosis, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Ischemic Stroke, Eating Disorders, depression, anxiety, stress and addiction. In this study, a Python package BERTopic, based on Artificial Intelligence based Natural Language Processing using Transformer model BERT, specializing in topic modeling, was applied to abstracts of 3,482 PubMed articles published from year 2014 until May 2024, to explore the mental, neurological, and behavioral diseases influenced by the gut microbiota. There were some variations in individual runs of BERTopic due to stochastic nature of one of its components, but overall the discovered topics corresponded to major neuropsychiatric diseases. To understand the impact of the variability in outcomes ten repeated runs of BERTopic were performed with keeping identical parameters. The major topics that were found consistently in all the ten repeated runs of BERTopic were Depression, Alzheimer Disease, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Parkinson's Disease, Multiple Sclerosis, Ischemic Stroke, Anorexia Nervosa and Schizophrenia.