• Wanglong Gou, Huijun Wang, Xin-Yi Tang, Yan He, Chang Su, Jiguo Zhang, Ting-Yu Sun, Zengliang Jiang, Zelei Miao, Yuanqing Fu, Hui Zhao, Yu-Ming Chen, Bing Zhang, Hongwei Zhou, and Ju-Sheng Zheng.
• Center for Intelligent Proteomics, Westlake Laboratory of Life Sciences and Biomedicine, Hangzhou, China.
• Bmc Med. 2023 Nov 1; 21 (1): 414414.

BackgroundThe early life stage is critical for the gut microbiota establishment and development. We aimed to investigate the lifelong impact of famine exposure during early life on the adult gut microbial ecosystem and examine the association of famine-induced disturbance in gut microbiota with type 2 diabetes.MethodsWe profiled the gut microbial composition among 11,513 adults (18-97 years) from three independent cohorts and examined the association of famine exposure during early life with alterations of adult gut microbial diversity and composition. We performed co-abundance network analyses to identify keystone taxa in the three cohorts and constructed an index with the shared keystone taxa across the three cohorts. Among each cohort, we used linear regression to examine the association of famine exposure during early life with the keystone taxa index and assessed the correlation between the keystone taxa index and type 2 diabetes using logistic regression adjusted for potential confounders. We combined the effect estimates from the three cohorts using random-effects meta-analysis.ResultsCompared with the no-exposed control group (born during 1962-1964), participants who were exposed to the famine during the first 1000 days of life (born in 1959) had consistently lower gut microbial alpha diversity and alterations in the gut microbial community during adulthood across the three cohorts. Compared with the no-exposed control group, participants who were exposed to famine during the first 1000 days of life were associated with consistently lower levels of keystone taxa index in the three cohorts (pooled beta - 0.29, 95% CI - 0.43, - 0.15). Per 1-standard deviation increment in the keystone taxa index was associated with a 13% lower risk of type 2 diabetes (pooled odds ratio 0.87, 95% CI 0.80, 0.93), with consistent results across three individual cohorts.ConclusionsThese findings reveal a potential role of the gut microbiota in the developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD) hypothesis, deepening our understanding about the etiology of type 2 diabetes.© 2023. The Author(s).

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