A new non-invasive test to diagnose cirrhosis liver should soon see the light of day, in order to limit surgeries such as biopsies. After three years of work, researchers from the National Institute of Agronomic Research (INRA) in collaboration with Chinese teams published a study in the journal Nature to present their new test, which is more than 90% reliable.
They started from the observation that people with cirrhosis of the liver have an intestinal flora, called microbiota, very different from that of healthy people, because it contains a high proportion of oral bacteria. “A plausible explanation would be that the bile dysfunction observed during cirrhosis of the liver would allow this normally impossible bacterial migration from the mouth to the intestine”, indicates INRA.
Encouraging therapeutic avenues
Thanks to this discovery, a stool test can prove whether or not there is a correlation between the proportion of oral bacteria in the intestine and the degree of severity of the disease. This test will not be available for several months, “but things can go quickly. And it will give a result in a few days”, says Dusko Ehrlich, director of research at Inra and one of the authors of the study, Quoted by Le Figaro.
This scientific breakthrough could have applications for other chronic diseases and opens up interesting therapeutic avenues, one of which consists in eliminating or deactivating oral bacteria in the intestine.
