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. 2024 Oct 17;14(1):24321.
doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-72962-3.

Unraveling the relative abundance of psychobiotic bacteria in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Mennat-Allah K Darwesh  1 , Wafaa Bakr  2 , Tarek E I Omar  3 , Mohammed A El-Kholy  4 , Nashwa Fawzy Azzam  2
Affiliations

Unraveling the relative abundance of psychobiotic bacteria in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Mennat-Allah K Darwesh et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by social deficits. Accumulated evidence has shown a link between alterations in the composition of gut microbiota and both neurobehavioural and gastrointestinal symptoms in children with ASD which are related to the genera Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium. These genera have been recently categorized as "psychobiotics". Moreover, this study aimed to compare the relative abundance of psychobiotics (L. plantarum, L. reuteri, and B. longum) to the total gut microbiome in typically developing (TD) children and those with ASD in order to correlate the distribution of psychobiotic with the severity and sensory impairments in autism. The ASD children were assessed using the Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS), while sensory impairments were evaluated using the Short Sensory Profile (SSP). Furthermore, the gut microbiome was analyzed using the quantitative real-time PCR. The study revealed a statistically significant increase in the relative abundance of L. reuteri and L. plantarum in the TD group in comparison to ASD children. Regarding the SSP total score of ASD children, a statistically significant negative correlation was found between both Lactobacillus and L. plantarum with the under-responsive subscale. For the Autism Treatment Evaluation Checklist (ATEC) score, B. longum and Lactobacillus showed a significant positive correlation with Health/Physical/Behaviour.

Keywords: Autism Spectrum Disorder; Behavioural effect; Children; Dysbiosis; Gut-brain axis; Psychobiotics.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Box and whisker graph of the relative abundance of L. reutri, L. plantarum, and B. longum in the studied groups, the thick line in the middle of the box represents the median, the box represents the inter-quartile range (from 25th to 75th percentiles), the whiskers represents the minimum and maximum.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Heatmap of the correlation between ATEC subscales and psychobiotic bacteria in children with ASD. The heatmap was generated using the Python programming language (version 3.8.10) with the Seaborn (version 0.11.2) and Matplotlib (version 3.4.2) libraries. The color coding scale ranges from blue to red, indicating the strength and direction of each correlation, where blue indicates negative correlations and red indicates positive correlations.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Heatmap of the correlations between psychobiotic bacteria and short sensory profile scores in children with ASD. For details on software and color-coding, refer to Fig. 2.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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