Potential Association between Vaginal Microbiota and Cervical Carcinogenesis in Korean Women: A Cohort Study

Abstract

Convincing studies demonstrated that vaginal flora is one of the most impactful key components for the well-being of the genital tract in women. Nevertheless, the potential capability of vaginal-derived bacterial communities as biomarkers to monitor cervical carcinogenesis (CC) has yet to be studied actively compared to those of bacterial vaginosis (BV). We hypothesized that vaginal microbiota might be associated with the progression of CC. In this study, we enrolled 23 participants, including healthy controls (HC group; n = 7), patients with cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) 2 and 3 (CIN group, n = 8), and patients with invasive cervical cancer (CAN group; n = 8). Amplicon sequencing was performed using the Ion Torrent PGM to characterize the vaginal microbiota. Patients with CIN and CAN presented vaginal microbiota dysbiosis compared with HC. The alpha diversity analysis revealed that CC has a trend to be increased in terms of diversity indexes. Moreover, CC was associated with the abundance of specific microbes, of which Lactobacillus and Gardnerella were the most significantly different between HC and CIN, whereas Streptococcus was differentially abundant in CAN compared with CIN. We then evaluated their diagnostic abilities. Testing in terms of diagnostic ability using the three genera revealed considerably high performance with an area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve of 0.982, 0.953, and 0.922. The current study suggests that the presence of Gardnerella and Streptococcus may be involved in the advancment of CC.

Dysbiosis of Cervical and Vaginal Microbiota Associated With Cervical Intraepithelial Neoplasia

“…Vaginal microbiota composition may be a promising biomarker to predict the CIN progression ( Curty et al., 2019 ; Mitra et al., 2020 ). Excessive genera such as Gardnerella and reduced Lactobacillus were revealed in CIN ( Mitra et al., 2020 ; Kang et al., 2021 ). Similarly, increased microbial diversity and decreased levels of Lactobacillus spp.…”

Disturbances of Vaginal Microbiome Composition in Human Papillomavirus Infection and Cervical Carcinogenesis: A Qualitative Systematic Review

“…( 24 ) reported a significant increase in L. crispatus in HSIL versus HPV infection. However, a significant increase in L. iners was observed in another group compared to that in the control group ( 34 ).…”

“…For example, Laniewski et al (24) reported a significant increase in L. crispatus in HSIL versus HPV infection. However, a significant increase in L. iners was observed in another group compared to that in the control group (34). Despite advancements in bioinformatics techniques in this field, vaginal microbiota studies continue to face methodological challenges.…”

Microbiome dataset of spontaneously fermented Ethiopian honey wine, Tej

“…Amplicon sequencing for each sample was performed using a barcode set of Nextera Library Preparation Kit (Illumina Inc., USA). The hypervariable (V4 -V5) region of 16S rRNA gene was PCR amplified by using 515F (GTGNCAGCMGCCGCGGTAA) as the forward-inner primer and 907R (CCGYCAATTYMTTTRAGTTT) as the reverse-inner primer [2] . The PCR amplifications by thermocycler (Mastercycler Nexus GSX1, Eppendorf, Germany) were performed in two phases.…”