Gut microbiota changes and its potential relations with thyroid carcinomaOriginal paper
Karen Pendergrass is a microbiome researcher specializing in microbiome-targeted interventions (MBTIs). She systematically analyzes scientific literature to identify microbial patterns, develop hypotheses, and validate interventions. As the founder of the Microbiome Signatures Database, she bridges microbiome research with clinical practice. In 2012, based on her own investigative research, she became the first documented case of FMT for Celiac Disease, four years before the first published case study.
Read MoreWhat was studied?
Researchers compared gut microbiota in 90 thyroid carcinoma patients and 90 healthy controls, using stool samples analyzed by 16S rRNA gene sequencing.
How was it studied?
An exploratory cohort of 60 patients and 60 controls was used to build a microbial signature via LEfSe, stepwise logistic regression, lasso regression, and random forest modeling. An independent cohort of 30 patients and 30 controls validated the findings, and Tax4Fun plus PICRUSt2 predicted functional pathway changes.
What did they find?
Thyroid carcinoma patients had reduced gut microbiota richness and diversity, though phylum-level abundances did not differ significantly overall. A 10-genus signature distinguished patients from controls, with AUCs of 0.809 in the exploration cohort and 0.746 in validation, and predicted functional changes included declines in aminoacyl-tRNA biosynthesis, homologous recombination, mismatch repair, DNA replication, and nucleotide excision repair. A separate four-genus signature distinguished patients with metastatic lymphadenopathy from those without.
Why it matters
These findings support gut microbiota dysbiosis as a feature of thyroid carcinoma and suggest stool-based microbial signatures could aid non-invasive diagnosis and staging.