PrevotellaBMC MICROBIOLOGY, YAMANAKA ET AL.The more scientists learn about the gut microbiome, the more roles it seems to play. New evidence from researchers at the New York University (NYU) School of Medicine, the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and the Harvard School of Public Health in Cambridge, Massachusetts, shows a correlation between onset of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) with the prevalence of a certain microbe—Prevotella copri. The work was published this week (November 5) in eLife.
“It's been suspected for years and years . . . that the development of autoimmune diseases like arthritis is dependent on the gut microbiota,” Diane Mathis, a professor of microbiology and immunobiology at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who was not involved in the work, told ScienceNOW. “It’s a very striking finding,” she added.
The researchers sequenced bacterial genes in 114 fecal samples from patients who had recently been diagnosed with RA, patients who had been treated for RA, patients with a different type of autoimmune arthritis (psoriatic), and healthy controls. They found P. copri in 75 percent of the samples from patients who had just been diagnosed with RA, but only in 21 percent of samples from healthy controls, 38 percent of samples ...
