IDDF2021-ABS-0140 Gut microbiota significantly correlate with body constitution in traditional chinese medicine

BackgroundThe gut microbiome plays an instrumental role in cardiovascular, metabolic and gastrointestinal health (Valdes et al. 2018). In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), one’s health status can be described by nine body constitutions (BCs) which are broadly classified as ‘Neutral’, indicating optimal health, or ‘Unbalanced’, indicating suboptimal health. Similar to the gut microbiome, BCs are strongly influenced by lifestyle and diet. We evaluated the gut microbial composition of Neutral, Qi-Deficiency (QD), Phlegm-dampness (PD) and Damp Heat (DH) subjects. The latter three are unbalanced BCs, with QD associated with heart disease (Zhu et al. 2017), PD with obesity and metabolic syndrome (Wang et al. 2013), and DH with gastrointestinal disease (Liang et al. 2020).MethodsStool samples were collected from 211 healthy subjects and gut microbial composition was profiled using 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing of the V3-V4 regions. BCs were determined using the Constitution in Chinese Medicine Questionnaire (Wang, 2005). Alpha diversity of QD, PD and DH was inferred and compared against that of Neutral using the Kruskal-Wallis test. Differentially abundant bacterial phyla, family and species were identified by calculating Log2FoldChange of taxa in the unbalanced BCs compared to Neutral.ResultsThere were 135 Neutral, 59 QD, 24 PD and 12 DH subjects. 16 participants exhibited two or more unbalanced BCs. PD exhibited significantly lower alpha diversity (Shannon, Simpson) than Neutral (p