Predictive value of the presence of Prevotella and the ratio of Porphyromonas gingivalis to Prevotella in saliva for esophageal squamous cell carcinoma

Imbalance of oral salivary microbiota has been linked to the pathogenesis of a variety of systemic diseases, and oral bacterial species have been shown to be useful biomarkers for systemic diseases.This study aimed to characterize the alterations of oral microbiota in patients with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) and to evaluate the diagnostic performance of oral microbial biomarkers for ESCC. The relative abundance of flora in saliva samples was analyzed by 16S rDNA sequencing, and differences in the species present in samples from ESCC patients and healthy controls (HCs) were identified by analyzing species diversity and performing LEfSe analysis. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was applied to evaluate the diagnostic performance of the characteristic bacteria individually and in combination. Differences in bacterial diversity indexes were observed for the saliva of ESCC patients versus HCs ( 0.05). LEfSe analysis showed that , , , , and were more abundant in ESCC patient saliva than in HC saliva, whereas ( ), ( ), , and were significantly less abundant in ESCC patient saliva (