Screening

CVD Screening via Stool Samples? Researchers Say It Is Possible

Machine learning models have identified fecal bacteria associated with cardiovascular disease (CVD) and may be a viable new diagnostic tool, according to new data presented at the American Heart Association’s Hypertension Sessions 2020.1

“Overall, our study is the first to identify dysbiosis of gut microbiota in CVD patients as a group and apply this knowledge to develop a gut microbiome–based [machine learning] approach for diagnostic screening of CVD,” the researchers wrote.

To test their hypothesis, the researchers performed fecal 16S rRNA sequencing in 478 patients with CVD and 473 patients without CVD who were participating in the American Gut Project. The fecal collections were then analyzed using 5 machine-learning algorithms.

From that analysis, 39 differential bacterial taxa were identified between patients with CVD and those without CVD. Using these taxa, machine learning models achieved a testing area under the receiver operating characteristic curves of ≈0.58.

When the researchers limited the selection to only the top 25 highly contributing operational taxonomic unit features, “the area under the receiver operating characteristic curves was further significantly enhanced to ≈0.70,” the researchers wrote.

“Despite the fact that gut microbiomes are highly variable among individuals, we were surprised by the promising level of accuracy obtained from these preliminary results, which indicate fecal microbiota composition could potentially serve as a convenient diagnostic screening method for CVD,” said study director, Bina Joe, PhD in a press release.2 “It is conceivable that one day, maybe without even assessing detailed cardiovascular function, clinicians could analyze the gut microbiome of patients’ stool samples with an artificial machine learning method to screen patients for heart and vascular diseases.”

—Amanda Balbi

References:

  1. Aryal S, Alimadadi A, Manandhar I, Joe B, Cheng X. Machine learning strategy for gut microbiome-based diagnostic screening of cardiovascular disease. Paper presented at: American Heart Association’s Hypertension Sessions 2020; September 10-13, 2020; Virtual. https://doi.org/10.1161/HYPERTENSIONAHA.120.15885
  2. Gut microbiome data may be helpful in routine screening of cardiovascular disease. News release. American Heart Association. September 10, 2020. Accessed September 10, 2020. https://newsroom.heart.org/news/gut-microbiome-data-may-be-helpful-in-routine-screening-of-cardiovascular-disease