Association Analysis of Gut Microbiota and Prognosis of Patients with Acute Ischemic Stroke in Basal Ganglia Region

Abstract

Previous studies have implied the potential impact of gut microbiota on acute ischemic stroke (AIS), but the relationships of gut microbiota with basal ganglia region infarction (BGRI) and the predictive power of gut microbiota in BGRI prognosis is unclear. The aim of this study was to ascertain characteristic taxa of BGRI patients with different functional outcomes and identify their predictive value. Fecal samples of 65 BGRI patients were collected at admission and analyzed with 16s rRNA gene sequencing. Three-month functional outcomes of BGRI were evaluated using modified Rankin Scale (mRS), and patients with mRS score of 0–1 were assigned to good-BGRI group while others were assigned to poor-BGRI group. We further identified characteristic microbiota using linear discriminant analysis effect size, and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was used to determine the predictive value of differential bacteria. According to the mRS score assessed after 3 months of stroke onset, 22 patients were assigned to poor-BGRI group, while 43 patients were assigned to good-BGRI group. Short chain fatty acids-producing bacteria, Romboutsia and Fusicatenibacter, were characteristic microbiota of the good-BGRI group, while pro-inflammatory taxa, Acetanaerobacterium, were characteristic microbiota of the poor-BGRI group. Furthermore, the differential bacteria showed extensive associations with clinical indices. ROC curves, separately plotted based on Romboutsia and Fusicatenibacter, achieved area under the curve values of 0.7193 and 0.6839, respectively. This study identified the efficient discriminative power of characteristic microbiota in BGRI patients with different outcomes and provided novel insights into the associations of gut microbiota with related risk factors.

Keywords

• ischemic stroke
• basal ganglia region infarction
• gut microbiota
• functional outcome
• ROC curve