Dysbiosis of gut microbiota and its correlation with dysregulation of cytokines in psoriasis patients

Abstract

Background Psoriasis is an inflammatory skin disease that is associated with multiple comorbidities and substantially diminishes patients’ quality of life. The gut microbiome has become a hot topic in psoriasis as it has been shown to have effect on both allergy and autoimmunity diseases in recent studies. Our objective was to identify differences in the faecal microbial composition of patients with psoriasis compared with healthy individuals in order to unravel the microbiota profiling in this autoimmune disease. Results We collected fecal samples from 30 psoriasis patients and 30 healthy controls and sequenced them by 16S rRNA high-throughput sequencing and identified the differences in the gut microbial composition between two groups through data analysis. Our results showed that different relative abundance of certain bacterial taxa between psoriasis patients and healthy individuals,including Faecalibacterium and Megamonas were increased in patients with psoriasis. It’s also implicated that many cytokines act as main effect molecules in the pathology of psoriasis. We selected the inflammation-related indicators that were abnormal in psoriasis patients and found the microbiome variations were associated with the level of them, especially interleukin-2 receptor showed a positive relationship with Phascolarctobacterium and a negative relationship with the Dialister. The correlation analysis based on microbiota and Inflammation-related indicators proved that microbiota dysbiosis might induce abnormal immune response in psoriasis. Conclusions We concluded that the gut microbiome composition in psoriasis patients has been altered markedly and provides evidence to understand the relationship between gut microbiota and psoriasis. More mechanistic experiments are needed to determine whether the differences observed in gut microbiota are the cause or consequences of psoriasis and whether the relationship between gut microbiota and cytokines was involved.