The Predictive Potentiality of Salivary Microbiome for the Recurrence of Early Childhood Caries

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate the variation of the salivary microbiota in the recurrence of early childhood caries (ECC), and to explore and verify the potential microbial indicators of ECC recurrence. Saliva samples from kindergarten children were tracked every 6 months for 1 year. Finally, in total 28 children and 84 samples were placed on the analysis phase: 7 children with ECC recurrence made up the ECC-recurrence (ER) group, 6 children without ECC recurrence constituted the non-ECC-recurrence (NER) group, and 15 children who kept ECC-free were set as the ECC-free (EF) group. DNA amplicons of the V3-V4 hypervariable region of the bacterial 16S rDNA were generated and sequencing was performed using Illumina MiSeq PE250 platform. No statistically significant differences of the Shannon indices were found in both cross-sectional and longitudinal comparisons. Furthermore, both principal coordinates analysis (PCoA) and heatmap plots demonstrated that the salivary microbial community structure might have potentiality to predict ECC recurrence at an early phase. The relative abundance of Fusobacterium, Prevotella, Leptotrichia, and Capnocytophaga differed significantly between the ER and NER groups at baseline. The values of area under the curve (AUC) of the four genera and their combined synthesis in the prediction for ECC recurrence were 0.857, 0.833, 0.786, 0.833, and 0.952, respectively. The relative abundance of Fusobacterium, Prevotella, Leptotrichia, and Capnocytophaga and their combination showed satisfactory accuracy in the prediction for ECC recurrence, indicating that salivary microbiome had predictive potentiality for recurrence of this disease. These findings might facilitate more effective strategy to be taken in the management of the recurrence of ECC.

Bacterial diversity and functional analysis of severe early childhood caries and recurrence in India

“…We could find only 5% of S. mutans in the SC microbiome and 2% in RC (Fig. S1B,C) which clearly indicates the scarcity of S. mutans in advanced caries, as seen before 6,19,27 . Whereas the non-mutan Streptococcus and S. oralis subsp.…”

“…As most of the earlier studies on dental caries have focused on the dysbiosis in oral microbiome 20,36 , wherein functional properties of these species in causing caries and its recurrence is contentious 6 . Positive interactions among the predicted carbohydrate metabolism and quorum sensing systems like ABC transport system, TCS, PTS with that of middle and late colonizers like Prevotella, Cardiobacterium, Carnobacteriaceae, Selenomonas, Prophyromonas, Micrococcaceae, Rothia, Bifidobacterium, Corynebacterium, Oribacterium, Lachnoanaerobaculum, Actinomyces and Saccharibacteria (TM07) could be correlated to the pathway of energy flow among these microbes that could enhances the severity of the condition by enriching more number of aciduric or acidogenic bacteria and evading the treatment method due to complexity of the bacteria present at that particular ecological niche.…”

The salivary microbiota in health and disease

“…One of these studies compared their findings in patients with recurrent caries (n = 7) with those of patients with a history of caries (n = 6) and caries-free controls (n = 15). The main finding was that salivary levels of Fusobacterium, Prevotella, Leptotrichia and Capnocytophaga species could predict recurrent caries with an AUC = 0.95 [54]. Likewise, another study reported that the composition of SM in combination with information on salivary levels of host defense peptides could predict caries progression [53].…”

“…In 2018 three longitudinal studies on SM in children with dental caries were published [52][53][54]. One of these studies compared their findings in patients with recurrent caries (n = 7) with those of patients with a history of caries (n = 6) and caries-free controls (n = 15).…”

The predictive power of saliva electrolytes exceeds that of saliva microbiomes in diagnosing early childhood caries

“…Salivary microbiome dysbiosis, allowing the promotion of cariogenic bacteria that lead to sustained demineralization of tooth tissue, has been implicated in dental caries [ 19–22 ]. Evidence from our and other studies demonstrated that the saliva microbial biomarkers could serve as a non-invasive and host-friendly proxy for risk assessment of ECC [ 22 , 23 ]. However, these organismal markers were tested in relatively small cohorts (e.g.…”