medwireNews: Study results suggest that patients with primary Sjögren’s syndrome (pSS), and those with similar symptoms, may experience dysbiosis of the buccal mucosa microbiome.
The researchers found that profiles of relative abundance of different types of bacteria were comparable among buccal swab samples taken from 37 pSS patients and 86 patients with similar dryness symptoms who did not meet the diagnostic criteria for pSS, but these profiles differed from those in swabs taken from 24 healthy controls.
pSS patients and those with similar symptoms had a higher Firmicutes/Proteobacteria ratio than healthy controls, “suggesting that a high Firmicutes/Proteobacteria ratio may be characteristic for the oral microbiome of oral dryness patients,” say Taco van der Meulen (University Medical Center Groningen, the Netherlands) and study co-authors.
The team also demonstrated that 12 out of 19 bacterial taxa that were significantly more abundant in patients with pSS relative to healthy controls in turn correlated with salivary secretion.
Therefore, “a substantial part of differentially abundant bacterial taxa in the oral microbiome of pSS patients can be explained by lower salivary secretion rate,” they conclude in Rheumatology.
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