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. 2024 Oct 28;10(21):e39827.
doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e39827. eCollection 2024 Nov 15.

The oral cavity is a potential reservoir of gram-negative antimicrobial-resistant bacteria, which are correlated with ageing and the number of teeth

Tomoki Kawayanagi  1   2 , Miki Kawada-Matsuo  2   3 , Toru Takeshita  4 , Mi Nguyen-Tra Le  2   3 , Mikari Asakawa  4 , Yo Sugawara  5 , Chika Arai  5 , Kazuhisa Ouhara  6 , Hiromi Nishi  7 , Noriyoshi Mizuno  6 , Hiroyuki Kawaguchi  7 , Hideki Shiba  1 , Motoyuki Sugai  3   5 , Hitoshi Komatsuzawa  2   3
Affiliations

The oral cavity is a potential reservoir of gram-negative antimicrobial-resistant bacteria, which are correlated with ageing and the number of teeth

Tomoki Kawayanagi et al. Heliyon. .

Abstract

Objectives: The suppression of antimicrobial-resistant bacteria (ARB) is an important issue worldwide. In recent years, the presence of various ARB in the oral cavity has been reported, but the details remain unclear. Therefore, we aimed to isolate ARB from the oral cavity and investigate the factors affecting ARB colonization.

Methods: Third-generation cephalosporin- or carbapenem-resistant gram-negative bacteria (GN-ARB) were isolated from the oral and nasal cavities of 514 participants who visited the dental clinic, and the whole-genome sequences of all the isolates were obtained. Additionally, the tongue microbiota was analysed by 16S rRNA sequencing. The correlations of GN-ARB isolation with clinical status and the tongue microbiota were subsequently investigated.

Results: Among 514 participants, 131 and 13 GN-ARB strains were isolated from the oral cavities of 93 participants (18.1 %) and from the nasal cavities of 12 participants (2.3 %). The ARB were mainly affiliated with Acinetobacter spp. (39.7 %), Pseudomonas spp. (14.5 %) and Stenotrophomonas maltophilia (18.3 %). We found a correlation between the isolation of oral GN-ARB and ageing/the number of teeth. There were no significant correlations between the presence of GN-ARB and tongue microbiota composition.

Conclusions: Our results suggest that the oral cavity is an important potential reservoir of GN-ARB and that ageing and tooth loss are risk factors for the presence of GN-ARB in the oral cavity.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests:Hitoshi Komatsuzawa reports financial support was provided by 10.13039/100009619The Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (10.13039/100009619AMED). If there are other authors, they declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Isolation of gram-negative ARB from oral and nasal cavities. (a) Number of participants with gram-negative ARB isolated from the oral and nasal cavities. (b) Percentages of genera among gram-negative ARB in the oral and nasal cavities.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Comparison of bacterial flora in patients with or without GN-ARB in the oral cavity. (a) Principal coordinate analysis (PCoA) plot showing similarity relationships among tongue microbiota constituents from the 484 patients according to the weighted UniFrac distance metric. The samples of patients with and without GN-ARB are depicted as dots in different colours (GN-ARB isolated and GN-ARB not isolated, respectively). The ellipses cover 67 % of the samples belonging to each group. The axes explain 45.5 and 21.7 % of the variance. Significant differences were assessed using the Wilcoxon rank-sum test with Benjamini–Hochberg adjustment for multiple comparisons. (b) Relative abundances of predominant bacterial genera (mean relative abundance >1 %) in patients with and without GN-ARB in tongue microbiota samples (GN-ARB isolated and GN-ARB not isolated, respectively).
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