The Human Microbiome and Autoimmune Arthritis: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Abstract
Background: There is a need for a systematic review of studies related to the oral microbiome and arthritis to find consistently reported differentially abundant taxa in the oral microbiome of arthritis patients. It is currently not known if oral-gut translocation occurs in arthritis. This study will conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of literature related to the differential abundance of microbial taxa in the oral microbiome of arthritis patients and healthy controls. The most commonly reported taxa from the systematic review will then be tested to see if they are also differentially abundant in the gut microbiome.
Methods: Studies were identified using PRISMA guidelines and study characteristics were curated on bugsigdb.org. A binomial test (p<.05) was used to test if the identified studies would be equally probable to report the bacterial taxa as decreased or increased. The most frequently identified taxa were further explored using a respondent-level dataset with demographic and relative abundance data of arthritis patients and healthy controls. A zero inflated negative binomial regression was used to test if the logarithmic fold change of the abundance of the bacterial taxa in arthritis patients relative to healthy controls was zero, i.e., that the abundance of the most frequently identified taxa is not affected by arthritis condition.
Results: Veillonella was found to be the most statistically significant bacteria to be consistently increased in relative abundance among arthritis patients relative to healthy controls. The results of the analysis using the respondent-level dataset did not find any evidence to suggest that Veillonella is differentially abundant in stool samples after adjusting for age and gender (LFC = .0167, 95% CI = -1.91,1.95, p-value = 0.98).