Microbiome Could Be Indicator of Rheumatoid Arthritis Prognosis

A significant indicator of whether a patient with rheumatoid arthritis will improve over the course of the disease may lie in part in their gut, according to new research from Mayo Clinic's Center for Individualized Medicine. The study, published in Genome Medicine, suggests that gut microbes and a patient's outcome of rheumatoid arthritis are connected.

For the study, the team performed shotgun metagenomic sequencing on stool samples from 32 patients with rheumatoid arthritis at two separate clinical visits. The team investigated the connection between the gut microbiome and meaningful changes in clinical disease activity. The team found several traits of the gut microbiome linked to future prognosis.

"By looking at patients' baseline gut microbiome profiles, we observed significantly different microbiome traits between patients who eventually showed improvement and those who did not," says John M. Davis, co-senior author.  ext, by using deep-learning artificial intelligence (AI), the investigators examined if they could predict whether a patient achieves clinical improvement.

Overall, the predictive performance resulted in 90% accuracy, thereby showcasing the proof of concept that the integration of gut microbiome and AI technology could theoretically be an avenue to predict disease course in rheumatoid arthritis.