Smoking and salivary microbiota: the effects of cigarette use

We published on Scientific Reports a study showing that cigarette smoking has a consistent and generalizable association on the composition of the oral microbiota.

English

The oral microbiota plays an important role in the exogenous nitrate reduction pathway and is associated with heart and periodontal disease and cigarette smoking. We describe smoking-related changes in oral microbiota composition and resulting potential metabolic pathway changes that may explain smoking-related changes in disease risk.

We analyzed health information and salivary microbiota composition among 1601 CHRIS participants collected 2017–2018. Salivary microbiota taxa were assigned from amplicon sequences of the 16S-V4 rRNA and used to describe microbiota composition and predict metabolic pathways.

Aerobic taxa relative abundance decreased with daily smoking intensity and increased with years since cessation, as did inferred nitrate reduction. Former smokers tended to be more similar to Never smokers than to Current smokers, especially those who had quit for longer than 5 years. Cigarette smoking has a consistent, generalizable association on oral microbiota composition and predicted metabolic pathways, some of which associate in a dose-dependent fashion. Smokers who quit for longer than 5 years tend to have salivary microbiota profiles comparable to never smokers

Read the full article here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42474-7

The salivary microbiota of individuals who quit smoking (n = 369) showed multiple-year perturbation and tends to resemble Never smokers’ profiles within 5 years. (A) Heatmap of the relationship between the years since quitting smoking and the mean relative abundance of genera previously found significantly associated with smoking (see Fig. 1). Taxa were transformed to relative abundance and scaled by row, to highlight differences in mean abundance in relation to bins of years since quitting to limit the low sample size of some categories. Complete linkage hierarchical clustering was used to cluster columns. Since Former smokers tend to be older and given the tendency of the elderly to lose teeth, we limited the visualization to people with 20 or more teeth. (B, C, D) Relative abundance of anaerobes, aerobes and facultative anaerobes in relation to years since quitting smoking.

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Giacomo Antonello

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