According to some bacteria in the mouth can detect pancreatic cancer
Characteristic microbiome described in the lingual lining of people with pancreatic cancer.
Although pancreatic cancer is rare (accounting for only 2.1% of all tumors), its incidence has increased steadily over the last 50 years; it is generally very aggressive and associated with poor survival. All these factors determine the importance of early diagnosis of this disease. This challenge seems achievable thanks to a new study showing that bacteria living on the tongue could become a warning sign of this disease.
In this study, to characterize the microbiome of the tongue coating of patients with pancreatic cancer, a team of researchers recruited a group of 30 patients with early-stage disease and a similar group of 25 healthy people. The participants were between 45 and 65 years of age, had no other conditions or oral health problems, and had not taken antibiotics or other medications during the three months before the study.
The team used sophisticated gene sequencing technologies to examine the diversity of microbiomes in the tongue-coating samples and found that patients with pancreatic cancer were colonized by markedly different tongue-coating microbiomes compared to healthy individuals. Lead author Lanjuan Li of Zhenjiang University in China says, "These results add to the growing evidence of an association between microbiome alterations and pancreatic cancer." However, with inevitable limitations, the promising results warrant further studies investigating this relationship.
The abundance of four types of bacteria (low levels of 'Haemophilus' and 'Porphyromonas' and high levels of 'Leptotrichia' and 'Fusobacterium') could distinguish pancreatic cancer patients from healthy individuals, which could lead to the development of new microbiome-based preventive or diagnostic tools for the disease.
Source Journal of Oral Microbiology
