Gut microbiota composition correlates with disease severity in myelodysplastic syndrome

The myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) is a heterogeneous group of clonal disorders of hematopoietic progenitor cells related to ineffective hematopoiesis and an increased risk of transformation to acute myelogenous leukemia. MDS is divided into categories, namely lineage dysplasia (MDS-SLD), MDS with ring sideroblasts (MDS-RS), MDS with multilineage dysplasia (MDS-MLD), MDS with excess blasts (MDS-EB). The International Prognostic Classification System (IPSS) ranks the patients as very low, low, intermediate, high, and very high based on disease evolution and survival rates. Evidence points to toll-like receptor (TLR) abnormal signaling as an underlying mechanism of this disease, providing a link between MDS and immune dysfunction. Notably, microbial signals, such as lipopolysaccharide from gram-negative bacteria can activate or suppress TLRs. Therefore, we hypothesized that MDS patients present gut microbiota alterations associated with disease subtypes and prognosis. We sequenced the 16S rRNA gene from fecal samples of 30 MDS patients and 16 healthy elderly controls to test this hypothesis. We observed a negative correlation between Prevotella spp. and Akkermansia spp. in MDS patients compared with the control group. High-risk patients presented a significant increase in the genus Prevotella spp. in relation to the other risk categories. There was a significant reduction in the abundance of the genus Akkermansia spp. in high-risk patients compared with low- and intermediate-risk. There was a significant decrease in the genus Ruminococcus spp. in MDS-EB patients compared with controls. Our findings show a new association between gut dysbiosis and higher-risk MDS, with a predominance of gram-negative bacteria in the gut of these patients.