Background: This study aims to explore differences in the intestinal microbiome between patients with newly diagnosed neovascular age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and controls using 16S rRNA gene sequencing. Methodology: In this cross-sectional study, stool samples from newly diagnosed White patients with neovascular AMD and controls were used for the assessment of the intestinal microbiome. The DNeasy PowerSoil Pro Kit (QIAGEN, Hilden, Germany) was used to extract microbial DNA before sequencing the V3-V4 hypervariable region of the 16S rRNA gene on the Illumina MiSeq system (Illumina, San Diego, CA). Bioinformatic analysis was performed on the Nephele platform using the DADA2 pipeline in R (ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT05757674). Results: Thirty-three patients (age: 75 ± 7 years, 17 women) and 34 age- and sex-matched controls (age: 73 ± 7 years, 18 women) were analyzed. No differences in height, weight, body mass index, smoking, or systemic comorbidities were noted between the groups. The most prevalent phyla in both groups were Firmicutes, Bacteroidota, Proteobacteria, and Actinobacteria. The most prevalent genus was Bacteroides in both groups. Neither alpha nor beta diversity was different among the groups. The differential abundance analysis using Analysis of Compositions of Microbiomes with Bias Correction 2 (ANCOM-BC2) showed that some Amplicon Sequence Variants (ASVs) from the Coprococcus genus were more abundant in controls than in patients with AMD, whereas several ASVs from Bacteroides were more abundant in the AMD group. Conclusions: In our sample, the intestinal microbiome of newly diagnosed patients with neovascular age-related AMD showed some small but noteworthy differences compared to matched healthy controls. Some Bacteroides ASVs were enriched in AMD patients, while certain Coprococcus ASVs were more abundant in controls.
Katsanos et al. (Fri,) studied this question.