New Delhi, Jan 16: Your mouth bacteria can significantly affect your gut health, and predict the risk of chronic liver disease, finds a study. Each year, more than two million people die from advanced chronic liver disease (ACLD).
In the study, published in the journal Nature Microbiology, the researchers analysed bacterial populations in saliva and stool samples from 86 patients. The team from the Technical University of Munich in Germany found that both the gut and oral microbiome undergo significant changes as liver disease worsens, where changes to the oral microbiome were already detectable at earlier disease stages. In healthy individuals, bacterial communities differ substantially between body sites. But, in patients with liver disease, oral and gut microbiomes became increasingly similar as the disease progressed, and nearly identical bacterial strains were recovered from the mouths and guts of patients. “These strains are typically found in the mouth and are rarely present in the healthy gut. However, we observed increases in the absolute abundances of these oral bacteria in patients with advanced chronic liver disease,” said Melanie Schirmer, Professor of Translational Microbiome Data Integration at TUM.