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Gut microbiota and chronic rhinosinusitis: a two-sample Mendelian randomization study

  • Rhinology
  • Published:
European Archives of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Background

The nasal cavity and gut are interconnected, both housing a rich natural microbiome. Gut microbiota may interact with nasal microbiota and contribute to the development of chronic rhinosinusitis (CRS). However, the specific role of gut microbiota in CRS has not been fully investigated. Therefore, we conducted a two-sample Mendelian randomization study to reveal the potential genetic causal effect of gut microbiota on CRS.

Methods

We performed a two-sample Mendelian Randomization (MR) analysis using aggregated data from genome-wide association studies (GWAS) on gut microbiota and CRS. The primary method used to assess the causal relationship between gut microbiota and CRS was the inverse variance weighting (IVW) method. In addition, sensitivity analyses were conducted to evaluate the robustness of the MR results, including heterogeneity, pleiotropy, and leave-one-out tests.

Results

Genetically predicted twelve gut microbiota, including class Coriobacteriia, class Methanobacteria, family Coriobacteriaceae, family Methanobacteriaceae, family Pasteurellaceae, genus Haemophilus, genus Ruminococcus torques group, genus Subdoligranulum, order Coriobacteriales, order Methanobacteriales, order Pasteurellales, and phylum Proteobacteria, demonstrated a potential inhibitory effect on CRS risk (P < 0.05). In addition, four gut microbiota, including family Streptococcaceae, genus Clostridium innocuum group, genus Oscillospira, and genus Ruminococcaceae NK4A214 group, exhibited a causal role in increasing CRS risk (P < 0.05). Sensitivity analyses showed no evidence of heterogeneity or pleiotropy (P > 0.05).

Conclusions

This study reveals the causal relationship between specific gut microbiota and CRS, which provides a new direction and theoretical foundation for the future development of interventions and prevention and treatment strategies for CRS.

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Availability of data and materials

Publicly available data sets were analyzed in this study. The data of gut microbiota and CRS (ID: ebi-a-GCST90018823) can be obtained from https://gwas.mrcieu.ac.uk/.

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Acknowledgements

We thank all the genetics consortiums for making the GWAS summary data publicly available.

Funding

This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Sichuan Province (Grant Number 2023NSFSC0621) and Chengdu Medical Research Project (Grant Number 2022013).

Author information

Author notes

  1. Fang Zhang and Boyu Cai have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, The Third People’s Hospital of Chengdu, The Affiliated Hospital of Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, 610031, Sichuan, China

    Fang Zhang, Jing Luo, Yixi Xiao, Yang Tian, Yi Sun & Jianhui Zhang

  2. Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, The Affiliated Hospital of North Sichuan Medical College, Nanchong, 637000, Sichuan, China

    Fang Zhang

  3. Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Second Affiliated Hospital of Naval Medical University, Naval Medical University, 415 Fengyang Road, Shanghai, 200003, China

    Boyu Cai & Huanhai Liu

Authors
  1. Fang Zhang
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  2. Boyu Cai
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  3. Jing Luo
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Huanhai Liu or Jianhui Zhang.

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The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Ethical approval and consent

This study only used publicly available GWAS summary data, so ethical approval is not required.

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Zhang, F., Cai, B., Luo, J. et al. Gut microbiota and chronic rhinosinusitis: a two-sample Mendelian randomization study. Eur Arch Otorhinolaryngol 281, 3025–3030 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00405-024-08468-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00405-024-08468-5

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