Relationship Between the Gastrointestinal Side Effects of an Anti-Hypertensive Medication and Changes in the Serum Lipid Metabolome

Integrated Omic Analysis of Human Plasma Metabolites and Microbiota in a Hypertension Cohort

Hypertension is closely related to metabolic dysregulation, which is associated with microbial dysbiosis and altered host-microbiota interactions. However, plasma metabolite profiles and their relationships to oral/gut microbiota in hypertension have not been evaluated in depth. Plasma, saliva, subgingival plaques, and feces were collected from 52 hypertensive participants and 24 healthy controls in a cross-sectional cohort. Untargeted metabolomic profiling of plasma was performed using high-performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. Microbial profiling of oral and gut samples was determined via 16S rRNA and metagenomic sequencing. Correlations between metabolites and clinic parameters/microbiota were identified using Spearman's correlation analysis. Metabolomic evaluation showed distinct clusters of metabolites in plasma between hypertensive participants and control participants. Hypertensive participants had six significantly increased and thirty-seven significantly decreased plasma metabolites compared to controls. The plasma metabolic similarity significantly correlated with the community similarity of microbiota. Both oral and gut microbial community composition had significant correlations with metabolites such as Sphingosine 1-phosphate, a molecule involved in the regulation of blood pressure. Plasma metabolites had a larger number of significant correlations with bacterial genera than fungal genera. The shared oral/gut bacterial genera had more correlations with metabolites than unique genera but shared fungal genera and metabolites did not show clear clusters. The hypertension group had fewer correlations between plasma metabolites and bacteria/fungi than controls at species level. The integrative analysis of plasma metabolome and oral/gut microbiome identified unreported alterations of plasma metabolites in hypertension and revealed correlations between altered metabolites and oral/gut microbiota. These observations suggested metabolites and microbiota may become valuable targets for therapeutic and preventive interventions of hypertension.

Role of the gut microbiome in cardiovascular drug response: The potential for clinical application

Response to cardiovascular drugs can vary greatly between individuals, and the role of the microbiome in this variability is being increasingly appreciated. Recent evidence indicates that bacteria and other microbes are responsible for direct and indirect effects on drug efficacy and toxicity. Pharmacomicrobiomics aims to uncover variability in drug response due to microbes in the human body, which may alter drug disposition through microbial metabolism, interference by microbial metabolites, or modification of host enzymes. In this review, we present recent advances in our understanding of the interplay between microbes, host metabolism, and cardiovascular drugs. We report numerous cardiovascular drugs with evidence of, or potential for, gut-microbe interactions. However, the effects of gut microbiota on many cardiovascular drugs are yet uninvestigated. Finally, we consider potential clinical applications for the described findings.

Nutrition, Microbiota and Noncommunicable Diseases

The advent of new sequencing technologies has inspired the foundation of novel research to ascertain the connections between the microbial communities that reside in our gut and some physiological and pathological conditions [...].