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Published on: March 24, 2023
Gut Microbiome-Based Metagenomic Signature for Non-invasive Detection of Advanced Fibrosis in Human Nonalcoholic
Rohit Loomba1, Victor Seguritan2, Weizhong Li3
1NAFLD Research Center, Department of Medicine, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA; Division of Epidemiology, Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA; Division of Gastroenterology, Department of Medicine, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA.
Abstract:
The presence of advanced fibrosis in nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is the most important predictor of liver mortality. There are limited data on the diagnostic accuracy of gut microbiota-derived signature for predicting the presence of advanced fibrosis. In this prospective study, we characterized the gut microbiome compositions using whole-genome shotgun sequencing of DNA extracted from stool samples. This study included 86 uniquely well-characterized patients with biopsy-proven NAFLD, of which 72 had mild/moderate (stage 0-2 fibrosis) NAFLD, and 14 had advanced fibrosis (stage 3 or 4 fibrosis). We identified a set of 40 features (p < 0.006), which included 37 bacterial species that were used to construct a Random Forest classifier model to distinguish mild/moderate NAFLD from advanced fibrosis. The model had a robust diagnostic accuracy (AUC 0.936) for detecting advanced fibrosis. This study provides preliminary evidence for a fecal-microbiome-derived metagenomic signature to detect advanced fibrosis in NAFLD.
