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Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 3|pp 2764—2776

Age-specific differential changes on gut microbiota composition in patients with major depressive disorder

Jian-Jun Chen1,2, Sirong He3, Liang Fang2,4, Bin Wang1, Shun-Jie Bai5, Jing Xie6, Chan-Juan Zhou7, Wei Wang8, Peng Xie4,7,8
  • 1Institute of Life Sciences, Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing 400016, China
  • 2Chongqing Key Laboratory of Cerebral Vascular Disease Research, Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing 400016, China
  • 3Department of Immunology, College of Basic Medicine, Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing 400016, China
  • 4Department of Neurology, Yongchuan Hospital of Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing 402160, China
  • 5Department of Laboratory, The First Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing 400016, China
  • 6Department of Endocrinology and Nephrology, Chongqing University Central Hospital, Chongqing Emergency Medical Center, Chongqing 400014, China
  • 7NHC Key Laboratory of Diagnosis and Treatment on Brain Functional Diseases, Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing 400016, China
  • 8Department of Neurology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing 400016, China
* Equal contribution
# Co-senior authors
Received: November 21, 2019Accepted: January 12, 2020Published: February 10, 2020
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.102775

Copyright: © 2020 Chen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Emerging evidence has shown the age-related changes in gut microbiota, but few studies were conducted to explore the effects of age on the gut microbiota in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD). This study was performed to identify the age-specific differential gut microbiota in MDD patients. In total, 70 MDD patients and 71 healthy controls (HCs) were recruited and divided into two groups: young group (age 18-29 years) and middle-aged group (age 30-59 years). The 16S rRNA gene sequences were extracted from the collected fecal samples. Finally, we found that the relative abundances of Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes were significantly decreased and increased, respectively, in young MDD patients as compared with young HCs, and the relative abundances of Bacteroidetes and Actinobacteria were significantly decreased and increased, respectively, in middle-aged MDD patients as compared with middle-aged HCs. Meanwhile, six and 25 differentially abundant bacterial taxa responsible for the differences between MDD patients (young and middle-aged, respectively) and their respective HCs were identified. Our results demonstrated that there were age-specific differential changes on gut microbiota composition in patients with MDD. Our findings would provide a novel perspective to uncover the pathogenesis underlying MDD.