Rheumatoid Arthritis and Prevotella Copri Bacteria

This note was published in Huffington post and is very interesting that new diagnosed patients with Rheumatoid arthritis had increased amounts of  Prevotella Copri bacteria in stools compared to patients who are being treated already with medications.

For the new study, published in the journal eLife, researchers obtained 44 fecal DNA samples from people newly diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis who had not yet received immune-suppressive treatments, in addition to 26 fecal DNA samples from people with treated rheumatoid arthritis. They also collected 16 fecal DNA samples from people with psoriatic arthritis and 28 fecal DNA sample from healthy people. They conducted gene sequencing on the 16S gene of these samples.

P. copri bacteria was found in the most fecal samples from the newly diagnosed patients, with 75 percent of the samples carrying the bacteria. Meanwhile, 21.4 percent of the samples from the healthy people carried the bacteria, 11.5 percent of samples from the people with treated rheumatoid arthritis carried it, and 37.5 percent of samples from people with psoriatic arthritis carried it.

As to why people with chronic, treated rheumatoid arthritis experienced lower levels of this bacteria in their stool samples, "it could be that certain treatments help stabilize the balance of bacteria in the gut," study researcher Jose U. Scher, M.D., director of the Microbiome Center for Rheumatology and Autoimmunity at NYU Langone Medical Center's Hospital for Joint Diseases, said in the statement. "Or it could be that certain gut bacteria favor inflammation."