Diversity analysis of gut microbiota in osteoporosis and osteopenia patients

Abstract

Some evidence suggests that bone health can be regulated by gut microbiota. To better understand this, we performed 16S ribosomal RNA sequencing to analyze the intestinal microbial diversity in primary osteoporosis (OP) patients, osteopenia (ON) patients and normal controls (NC). We observed an inverse correlation between the number of bacterial taxa and the value of bone mineral density. The diversity estimators in the OP and ON groups were increased compared with those in the NC group. Beta diversity analyses based on hierarchical clustering and principal coordinate analysis (PCoA) could discriminate the NC samples from OP and ON samples. Firmicutes, Bacteroidetes, Proteobacteria and Actinobacteria constituted the four dominant phyla in all samples. Proportion of Firmicutes was significantly higher and Bacteroidetes was significantly lower in OP samples than that in NC samples (p < 0.05), Gemmatimonadetes and Chloroflexi were significantly different between OP and NC group as well as between ON and NC group (p < 0.01). A total of 21 genera with proportions above 1% were detected and Bacteroides accounted for the largest proportion in all samples. The Blautia, Parabacteroides and Ruminococcaceae genera differed significantly between the OP and NC group (p < 0.05). Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) results showed one phylum community and seven phylum communities were enriched in ON and OP, respectively. Thirty-five genus communities, five genus communities and two genus communities were enriched in OP, ON and NC, respectively. The results of this study indicate that gut microbiota may be a critical factor in osteoporosis development, which can further help us search for novel biomarkers of gut microbiota in OP and understand the interaction between gut microbiota and bone health.

Assessing the Relationship Between Gut Microbiota and Bone Mineral Density

“…The changes of composition and abundance of microbiota have been linked with many inflammatory and metabolic disorders, such as inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis, type 2 diabetes, and obesity (Ley et al, 2006;Frank et al, 2007;Qin et al, 2012;Zhang et al, 2015). More recently, Wang et al conducted a 16S rRNA gene sequencing to detect the composition and diversity changes of gut microbiota in patients with primary osteoporosis and primary osteopenia (Wang et al, 2017). The results suggest that compared with normal controls, the bacterial composition and diversity are altered in osteoporosis and osteopenia patients, which supported the view that the bone health might be influenced by the gut microbiota (Wang et al, 2017).…”

Alteration of fecal microbial compositions and bacterial taxa in female osteoporotic patients

“…For example, we found an increased abundance of Bacteroides genus in osteoporosis group, which is consistent with previous report (11). Bacteroides is one of the most dominant genera in both osteoporotic individuals and normal subjects samples (10). As previously reported, Bacteroidetes might be involved in bone formation and bone resorption by deposition and hydrolysis of serine dipeptide lipids (18).…”

“…Das et al reported there were differences of gut microbiota composition between osteoporosis /osteopenia and controls with an Irish cohort of older adults (9). Wang et al analyzed the gut microbiota diversity in a relatively small sample with 6 primary osteoporosis patients, 6 osteopenia patients and 6 healthy controls (10). Li et al identified several differential fecal bacterial taxa from patients with low bone mineral density (11).…”

The Microbiome and Bone and Joint Disease

“…However, to date there is only one report linking the microbiome to osteoporosis in humans: the gut flora in patients with osteoporosis (defined using bone mineral density (BMD)) was recently reported to be different from that of normal controls (microbiota assessed by analysis of fecal 16S rRNA) [28]. While the report is clearly limited by a small sample size (n=6/group), it does support the idea that osteoporosis is associated with changes in the gut microbiota.…”