Original ResearchFull Report: Basic and Translational—Alimentary TractIntestinal Fungal Dysbiosis Is Associated With Visceral Hypersensitivity in Patients With Irritable Bowel Syndrome and Rats
Section snippets
Patient Characteristics and Ethics Statement
Patient characteristics are provided in Table 1. The IBS and healthy volunteer population included are subgroups of the Maastricht-IBS cohort, comprising 540 IBS patients and 205 healthy controls. The patients represent a mixed population from primary to tertiary care with an established clinical diagnosis of IBS according to the Rome III criteria. Age, gender, medication use, mean anxiety, depression, and symptom scores do not differ when compared with the total IBS cohort (data not shown).
Mycobiome Differences Exist Between Healthy Volunteers, Hypersensitive IBS, and Normally Sensitive IBS Patients
We compared the fecal mycobiome of healthy volunteers, hypersensitive IBS patients, and normally sensitive IBS patients. Figure 1A depicts the 30 most predominant species and shows that the human mycobiome is dominated by 2 yeasts; Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Candida albicans. In healthy volunteers, their combined presence was 57% of total reads. In IBS these species were even more predominant and added up to 76% and 83% in hypersensitive and normally sensitive IBS patients, respectively.
Discussion
Until now, investigations on the possible role of gut microbial communities in IBS almost exclusively focused on bacteria. Based on recent evidence that fungi can aggravate disease severity in colitis,19, 21, 22, 23, 24 we assessed the role of the gut mycobiome in IBS. We observed altered mycobiome composition in patients, which led us to assess the role of fungi in the maternal separation model for stress-induced visceral hypersensitivity. Fungicide treatment of hypersensitive rats reversed
Acknowledgements
Raw sequence data will be deposited in the European Nucleotide Archive.
Guus Roeselers, Evgeni Levin, and Daisy M. Jonkers contributed equally to is work.
The current affiliation for Guus Roeselers and Heleen H. de Weerd is: Danone-Nutricia Research, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
The current affiliations for Evgeni Levin is:Department of Experimental Vascular Medicine, Academic Medical Center, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; and Horaizon BV, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
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Conflicts of interest The authors disclose the following: W.deJ. has received consultancy fees from GlaxoSmithKline, receives research grant support from GlaxoSmithKline, Dr Willmar Schwabe GMbH, and Mead Johnsson Nutrition Pediatric Institute. R.vdW. receives research grant support from Dr Willmar Schwabe GMbH. All other authors disclose no competing financial interests.
Funding S.B. was supported by The Netherlands Digestive Diseases Foundation, project no. 1CDP005. W.deJ. is supported by an NWO VIDI grant and Marie Curie ETN grant no. 641665.
Author names in bold designate shared co-first authorship.