Salivary Oral Microbiome of Children With Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis: A Norwegian Cross-Sectional Study.

Background: The oral microbiota has been connected to the pathogenesis of rheumatoid arthritis through activation of mucosal immunity. The objective of this study was to characterize the salivary oral microbiome associated with juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA), and correlate it with the disease activity including gingival inflammation.

Methods: Fifty-nine patients with JIA (mean age, 12.6 ± 2.7 years) and 34 healthy controls (HC; mean age 12.3 ± 3.0 years) were consecutively recruited in this Norwegian cross-sectional study. Information about demographics, disease activity, medication history, frequency of tooth brushing and a modified version of the gingival bleeding index (GBI) and the simplified oral hygiene index (OHI-S) was obtained. Microbiome profiling of saliva samples was performed by sequencing of the V1-V3 region of the 16S rRNA gene, coupled with a species-level taxonomy assignment algorithm; QIIME, LEfSe and R-package for Spearman correlation matrix were used for downstream analysis.

Results: There were no significant differences between JIA and HC in alpha- and beta-diversity. However, differential abundance analysis revealed several taxa to be associated with JIA: , and at the genus level; and oral taxon 417, oral taxon 352 and oral taxon 864 among others, at the species level. species, oral taxon 223, and , were associated with healthy controls. , sp. oral taxon 498 and oral taxon 914 correlated positively with the composite juvenile arthritis 10-joint disease activity score (JADAS10), while oral taxon 44 among others, correlated with the number of active joints. Of all microbial markers identified, only and oral taxon 44 maintained false discovery rate (FDR) < 0.1.

Conclusions: In this exploratory study of salivary oral microbiome we found similar alpha- and beta-diversity among children with JIA and healthy. Several taxa associated with chronic inflammation were found to be associated with JIA and disease activity, which warrants further investigation.