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The effects of cigarettes and alcohol on intestinal microbiota in healthy men

Journal of Microbiology volume 58, pages 926–937 (2020)Cite this article

Abstract

Human intestinal microbiota is affected by the exogenous microenvironment. This study aimed to determine the effects of cigarettes and alcohol on the gut microbiota of healthy men. In total, 116 healthy male subjects were enrolled and divided into four groups: non-smoking and non-drinking (Group A), smoking only (Group B), drinking only (Group C), and smoking and drinking combined (Group D). Fecal samples were collected and sequenced using 16S rRNA to analyze the microbial composition. Short-chain fatty acid (SCFAs) levels in feces were determined by gas chromatography. We found that cigarette and alcohol consumptions can alter overall composition of gut microbiota in healthy men. The relative abundances of phylum Bacteroidetes and Firmicutes and more than 40 genera were changed with cigarette and alcohol consumptions. SCFAs decreased with smoking and alcohol consumption. Multivariate analysis indicated that when compared with group A, group B/C/D had higher Bacteroides, and lower Phascolarctobacterium, Ruminococcaceae_UCG-002, Ruminococcaceae_UCG-003, and Ruminiclostridium_9 regardless of BMI and age. Additionally, the abundance of Bacteroides was positively correlated with the smoking pack-year (r = 0.207, p < 0.05), the abundance of predicted pathway of bacterial toxins (r = 0.3672, p < 0.001) and the level of carcinoembryonic antigen in host (r = 0.318, p < 0.01). Group D shared similar microbial construction with group B, but exerted differences far from group C with lower abundance of Haemophilus. These results demonstrated that cigarette and alcohol consumption separately affected the intestinal microbiota and function in healthy men; furthermore, the co-occurrence of cigarette and alcohol didn’t exacerbate the dysbiosis and cigarette played the predominated role on the alteration.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to all the subjects who participated in our study. This work was supported by the Public Welfare Technology Application Research Plan of Zhejiang Province for Laboratory Animals (2017C37149), Science and Technology Plan of Medicine and Health of Zhejiang Province (2018KY-474), and Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (LY18H160011).

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  1. These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Gastroenterology, Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital, School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, P. R. China

    Renbin Lin, Yawen Zhang, Luyi Chen, Yadong Qi, Jiamin He, Mengjia Hu, Ying Zhang, Lina Fan, Tao Yang, Lan Wang & Shujie Chen

  2. Institute of Gastroenterology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, P. R. China

    Renbin Lin, Yawen Zhang, Luyi Chen, Yadong Qi, Jiamin He, Mengjia Hu, Ying Zhang, Lina Fan, Tao Yang, Lan Wang & Shujie Chen

  3. The Affiliated Stomatology Hospital, School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, P. R. China

    Misi Si

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  1. Renbin Lin
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Correspondence to Lan Wang, Misi Si or Shujie Chen.

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Author Contributions

SJC, MSS, and LW conceived and designed our project. RBL, YWZ, LYC, YDQ, JMH, MJH, YZ, TY, and LNF collected samples. YDQ, JMH, and MJH packed samples, extracted DNA, and sent samples. YWZ and LYC analyzed and interpreted the data. RBL and YWZ drafted the manuscript and made charts. SJC, MSS, and LW revised the manuscript. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript.

Availability of Data and Materials

The sequences from our study were deposited in the NCBI Sequence Read Archive (nos. SRP238779).

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This study was conducted under the guidelines of the Ethics Committee of Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital and the China Association for Clinical Research.

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The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

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Lin, R., Zhang, Y., Chen, L. et al. The effects of cigarettes and alcohol on intestinal microbiota in healthy men. J Microbiol. 58, 926–937 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12275-020-0006-7

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Keywords

  • cigarette
  • alcohol
  • intestinal microbiota
  • co-occurrence
  • microbiota-host interaction