Oral microbiome and ischemic stroke risk among elderly Chinese women

ABSTRACT

Background

Stroke, a leading cause of disability worldwide, has been associated with periodontitis. However, whether stroke risk is related to oral microbiota remains unknown. This study aims to evaluate the associations between the oral microbiome and ischemic stroke risk.

Methods

In a case-control study of 134 case-control pairs nested within a prospective cohort study, we examined pre-diagnostic oral microbiome in association with stroke risk via shotgun metagenomic sequencing. The microbial sub-community and functional profiling were performed using Latent Dirichlet Allocation and HUMAnN2. Associations of microbial diversity, sub-community structure, and individual microbial features with ischemic stroke risk were evaluated via conditional logistic regression.

Results

Alpha and beta diversities differ significantly between cases and controls. One genus- and two species-level sub-communities were significantly associated with decreased ischemic stroke risk, with odds ratios (95% confidence intervals) of 0.52 (0.31–0.90), 0.51 (0.31–0.84), and 0.60 (0.36–0.99), respectively. These associations were potentially driven by the representative taxa in these sub-communities, i.e., genus Corynebacterium and Lautropia, and species Lautropia mirabilis and Neisseria elongate (p < 0.05). Additionally, 55 taxa, 1,237 gene families, and 90 metabolic pathways were associated with ischemic stroke risk at p < 0.05.

Conclusion

Our study highlights the role of oral microbiota in the etiology of ischemic stroke and calls for further research.

KEYWORDS:

• Ischemic stroke
• oral microbiome
• nested case-control study
• microbial sub-community
• Latent Dirichlet Allocation

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank participants and research team members of SWHS for their contributions to the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

X-O.S. and J.L. conceived the study. C.W. and Y.Y. analyzed data and drafted the initial manuscript. W.Z. obtained the funding and contributed to study design. H.C. contributed to data management. Y.G. contributed to the field work. Q.C. and J.W. contributed to the lab work. All authors critically reviewed and proved the manuscript.

Data availability statement

Data are available from the corresponding author on request.

Statement of ethics

Written informed consent was provided by all participants, and the SWHS was approved by the institutional review boards of Vanderbilt University and the Shanghai Cancer Institute.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/20002297.2023.2266655.

Additional information

Funding

The SWHS was supported by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) grant UM1CA182910 (to W.Z). C.W. is supported by Ingram Cancer Research Professorship fund (to X-O.S.). Y.Y. is supported partially by the NCI grant K99/R00 CA248822. Sample preparation was conducted at the Survey and Biospecimen Shared Resources, which is supported in part by the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (P30 CA68485). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the study.