Abstracto

Gut microbiota dysbiosis in patients with large artery atherosclerotic stroke: a pilot study

Miranda Clark*

Introduction: Increasing data demonstrate an association between the gut microbiome and brain diseases via the gut-brain axis. However, few studies have evaluated the association between the gut microbiome and large artery atherosclerosis (LAA) ischemic stroke patients. Methods: A cross-sectional pilot study was conducted among 14 LAA stroke patients and 15 asymptomatic individuals. LAAs were diagnosed using the TOAST classification. The control group was selected based on age and sex matching with the patient group. Participants provided a stool sample profiled by 16S rRNA sequencing. The Mann-Whitney U test was used to compare differences in gut microbiota profile between groups. Alpha diversity and beta diversity assess gut microbial diversity. Gut microbial genus and stroke were correlated using generalized linear mixed-effects models that were adjusted for age, BMI, underlying disease (diabetes, hypertension, and dyslipidemia), and alcohol consumption. Results: The mean age of stroke patients was 61.1 ± 7.1 and 59.2 ± 8.2 in the control group. Beta diversity (Bray-Curtis dissimilarity) of the gut microbiome was statistically significant at the order, family, and genus levels (P-value=0.017, 0.011, and 0.003, respectively) between the stroke and control groups; however, there was no statistically significant difference in alpha diversity (Shannon diversity index; P-value=0.852). Using the generalized linear mixture effect model, we found that 6 genera were significantly associated with stroke after multivariate adjustment. Ruminococcus spp. (P-value=0.017), Streptococcus spp. (P-value=0.019), Actinomyces spp. (P-value=0.02) and Dorea spp. (P-value=0.021) showed positive association while Bifidobacterium spp. (P-value=0.04) and Faecalibacterium spp. (P-value=0.041) showed negative association with stroke. Conclusion: Patients with left atrial stroke had reduced microbiome beta diversity and certain genera of gut microbiota may be related to left atrial stroke.