RESEARCH ARTICLE Intestinal Microbiota in Patients with Spinal Cord

Human intestinal flora comprises thousands of bacterial species. Growth and composition of intestinal microbiota is dependent on various parameters, including immune mecha-nisms, dietary factors and intestinal motility. Patients with spinal cord injury (SCI) frequently display neurogenic bowel dysfunction due to the absence of central nervous system control over the gastrointestinal system. Considering the bowel dysfunction and altered colonic transit time in patients with SCI, we hypothesized the presence of a significant change in the composition of their gut microbiome. The objective of this study was to characterize the gut microbiota in adult SCI patients with different types of bowel dysfunction. We tested our hypothesis on 30 SCI patients (15 upper motor neuron [UMN] bowel syndrome, 15 lower motor neuron [LMN] bowel syndrome) and 10 healthy controls using the 16S rRNA sequencing. Gut microbial patterns were sampled from feces. Independent of study groups, gut microbiota of the participants were dominated by Blautia, Bifidobacterium, Faecalibac-terium and Ruminococcus. When we compared all study groups, Roseburia, Pseudobutyri-vibrio, Dialister, Marvinbryantia and Megamonas appeared as the genera that wer