Altered ocular surface microbiota in obesity: a case-control study

This study aimed to investigate the composition of ocular surface microbiota in patients with obesity. This case-control study, spanning from November 2020 to March 2021 at Henan Provincial People's Hospital, involved 35 patients with obesity and an equivalent number of age and gender-matched healthy controls. By employing 16S rRNA sequencing, this study analyzed the differences in ocular surface microbiota between the two groups. The functional prediction analysis of the ocular surface microbiota was conducted using PICRUSt2. The alpha diversity showed no notable differences in the richness or evenness of the ocular surface microbiota when comparing patients with obesity to healthy controls (Shannon index, =0.1003). However, beta diversity highlighted significant variances in the microbiota composition of these two groups (ANOSIM, =0.005). LEfSe analysis revealed that the relative abundances of , , , , , and in patients with obesity were significantly increased (