What question did this study set out to answer?

To investigate the composition of the airway microbiome in stable asthma compared to healthy controls.

Altered airway microbiome in stable asthma

View Full Paper

Ask AI

Bookmark

Authors

Observational study uncovers altered airway microbiome and inflammation in asthmatics, suggesting new insights into asthma management.

To investigate the composition of the airway microbiome in stable asthma compared to healthy controls.
Recruited 23 non-smoking stable asthma patients and 9 healthy subjects.
Collected induced sputum samples for microbial analysis.
Amplified and sequenced the V3-V5 regions of bacterial 16S rRNA genes using 454 pyrosequencing.
Assigned sequences to bacterial taxa using the Ribosomal Database Project.
Asthmatic patients had a lower %FEV1 predicted compared to controls (73.4 vs 99.4; p<0.001).
Higher sputum eosinophil count in asthmatics (24.0% vs 0.5%; p<0.001).
Species richness was significantly lower in asthmatics (85.0 vs 107.9 taxa; p=0.005).
Detected 6 major bacterial phyla, with Bacteroidetes, Firmicutes, and Proteobacteria constituting over 90% of sequences.
Actinobacteria were more frequent in asthmatic samples (2.2% vs 0.6%; P=0.02).

Zhang et al. (2014) studied this question.

View Full Paper

Ask AI

Bookmark