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Close social relationships correlate with human gut microbiota composition.

ABSTRACT: Social relationships shape human health and mortality via behavioral, psychosocial, and physiological mechanisms, including inflammatory and immune responses. Though not tested in human studies, recent primate studies indicate that the gut microbiome may also be a biological mechanism linking relationships to health. Integrating microbiota data into the 60-year-old Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, we found that socialness with family and friends is associated with differences in the human fecal microbiota. Analysis of spouse (N?=?94) and sibling pairs (N?=?83) further revealed that spouses have more similar microbiota and more bacterial taxa in common than siblings, with no observed differences between sibling and unrelated pairs. These differences held even after accounting for dietary factors. The differences between unrelated individuals and married couples was driven entirely by couples who reported close relationships; there were no differences in similarity between couples reporting somewhat close relationships and unrelated individuals. Moreover, married individuals harbor microbial communities of greater diversity and richness relative to those living alone, with the greatest diversity among couples reporting close relationships, which is notable given decades of research documenting the health benefits of marriage. These results suggest that human interactions, especially sustained, close marital relationships, influence the gut microbiota.

SUBMITTER: Dill-McFarland KA

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6345772 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Close social relationships correlate with human gut microbiota composition.

Dill-McFarland Kimberly A KA Tang Zheng-Zheng ZZ Kemis Julia H JH Kerby Robert L RL Chen Guanhua G Palloni Alberto A Sorenson Thomas T Rey Federico E FE Herd Pamela P

Scientific reports 20190124 1

Social relationships shape human health and mortality via behavioral, psychosocial, and physiological mechanisms, including inflammatory and immune responses. Though not tested in human studies, recent primate studies indicate that the gut microbiome may also be a biological mechanism linking relationships to health. Integrating microbiota data into the 60-year-old Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, we found that socialness with family and friends is associated with differences in the human fecal mic ...[more]

PMID: 30679677

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Project description:BackgroundThe gut microbiota (GM) has proven to be essential for both physical health and mental wellbeing, yet the forces that ultimately shape its composition remain opaque. One critical force known to affect the GM is the social environment. Prior work in humans and free-ranging non-human primates has shown that cohabitation and frequent social interaction can lead to changes in GM composition. However, it is difficult to assess the direction of causation in these studies, and interpretations are complicated by the influence of uncontrolled but correlated factors, such as shared diet.ResultsWe performed a 15-month longitudinal investigation wherein we disentangled the impacts of diet and social living conditions on GM composition in a captive cohort of 13 male cynomolgus macaques. The animals were in single housing for the first 3 months of the study initially with a variable diet. After baseline data collection they were placed on a controlled diet for the remainder of the study. Following this diet shift the animals were moved to paired housing for 6 months, enabling enhanced social interaction, and then subsequently returned to single housing at the end of our study. This structured sequencing of diet and housing changes allowed us to assess their distinct impacts on GM composition. We found that the early dietary adjustments led to GM changes in both alpha and beta diversity, whereas changes in social living conditions only altered beta diversity. With respect to the latter, we found that two particular bacterial families - Lactobacillaceae and Clostridiaceae - demonstrated significant shifts in abundance during the transition from single housing to paired housing, which was distinct from the shifts we observed based on a change in diet. Conversely, we found that other bacteria previously associated with sociality were not altered based on changes in social living conditions but rather only by changes in diet.ConclusionsTogether, these findings decouple the influences that diet and social living have on GM composition and reconcile previous observations in the human and animal literatures. Moreover, the results indicate biological alterations of the gut that may, in part, mediate the relationship between sociality and wellbeing.

Project description:The mammalian intestinal tract is heavily colonized with a dense, complex, and diversified microbial populations. In healthy individuals, an array of epithelial antimicrobial agents is secreted in the gut to aid intestinal homeostasis. Enterochromaffin cells (EC) in the intestinal epithelium are a major source of chromogranin A (CgA), which is a pro-hormone and can be cleaved into many bioactive peptides that include catestatin (CST). This study was carried out to evaluate the possible impact of CST on gut microbiota in vivo using a mouse model. The CST (Human CgA352-372) or normal saline was intrarectally administered in C57BL/6 male mice for 6 days and then sacrificed. Feces and colonic mucosa tissue samples were collected, DNA was extracted, the V4 region of bacterial 16S rRNA gene was amplified and subjected to MiSeq Illumina sequencing. The α-diversity was calculated using Chao 1 and β-diversity was determined using QIIME. Differences at the genus level were determined using partial least square discriminant analysis (PLS-DA). Phylogenetic investigation of communities by reconstruction of unobserved states (PICRUSt) was used to predict functional capacity of bacterial community. CST treatment did not modify bacterial richness in fecal and colonic mucosa-associated microbiota; however, treatment significantly modified bacterial community composition between the groups. Also, CST-treated mice had a significantly lower relative abundance of Firmicutes and higher abundance of Bacteroidetes, observed only in fecal samples. However, at lower phylogenetic levels, PLS-DA analysis revealed that some bacterial taxa were significantly associated with the CST-treated mice in both fecal and colonic mucosa samples. In addition, differences in predicted microbial functional pathways in both fecal and colonic mucosa samples were detected. The results support the hypothesis that CST treatment modulates gut microbiota composition under non-pathophysiological conditions, however, the result of this study needs to be further validated in a larger experiment. The data may open new avenues for the development of a potential new line of antimicrobial peptides and their use as therapeutic agents to treat several inflammatory conditions of the gastrointestinal tract, such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), inflammatory bowel syndrome (IBS), or other health conditions.

Dataset Information

Close social relationships correlate with human gut microbiota composition.

Publications

Close social relationships correlate with human gut microbiota composition.

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