Some bacteria on the tongue would help distinguish patients with early pancreatic cancer from healthy individuals.
If pancreatic cancer is “rare” (1.9% of cancers in France, or 12,000 people) it is nonetheless one of the deadliest, leading to the death of more than 300,000 people a year worldwide. The reason ? Pancreatic cancer is vicious in that it spreads in the early stages without causing any recognizable symptoms.
The tumor will interfere with the proper functioning of the pancreas and compress the canals of the digestive tract and nearby blood vessels. When it causes real symptoms, the cancer then becomes very aggressive, and the diagnosis is usually made at a too advanced stage of the disease. Improving early detection to guarantee a greater chance of survival for those affected is therefore an important issue. Chinese researchers may have made a discovery in this direction. Their work has been published in the Journal of Oral Microbiology.
An idea from traditional Chinese medicine
The latter were inspired by traditional Chinese medicine to conduct their research. In China, many doctors rely on the appearance of the tongue to judge whether their patients’ organs are working well. The research team therefore tried to find a link between the composition of the biome of our tongue, and early-stage pancreatic cancer. Aided by modern DNA sequencing techniques, the researchers then compared the microbiomes of the tongue of 30 patients with symptoms of this cancer and 15 other healthy people. Three months before, the participants had been asked not to take any medication so as not to alter the microbial composition of their tongue.
More diverse bacteria in pancreatic cancer patients
After analyzing all these microbiomes, the scientists explain that patients with pancreatic cancer were “colonized by a microbiota remarkably different from that of healthy controls”. In detail, patients suffering from pancreatic cancer had significantly higher levels of four types of bacteria on their tongue than healthy patients: Leptotrichia, Fusobacterium, Haemophilus and Porphyromonas.
According to the research team, it would be a rbody’s inflammatory response, which reacts to the development of cancer. These results are very promising, as explained by Lanjuan Li, of Zhenjiang University and lead author of the study: “Our results add to the growing evidence of a link between microbiome disturbances and pancreatic cancer. If further studies confirm these associations, this could potentially lead to the development of new microbiome-based tools for early diagnosis or disease prevention.” But we will have to wait new research, conducted on larger samples, to learn more.
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