Systemic interactions between human body organs, such as the gut-brain axis, and the corresponding mediators are largely unknown. This study aims to shed light on a specific aspect of these interactions by focusing on the oral microbiome, metabolism, and brain/behavior with respect to smoking.
We analyze three comprehensive datasets covering oral microbiota composition, psychological traits, and metabolic pathways from smokers and non-smokers (based in UAE). Comparative analysis reveals no significant differences in the datasets between smokers and non-smokers. However, our findings show a tight correlation between metabolic pathway data and oral microbiome composition across all subjects. Using canonical correlation analysis (CCA) and non-linear regression, we identify steady-state interactions for the microbiome-metabolism-brain system.
Our approach allows us to make accurate predictions of a patients system state. Moreover, we discover that smoking weakens the directed impact of metabolic pathways to psychological traits. The latter suggests that perturbations in these interactions could destabilize the steady-state observed in non-smokers, potentially leading to pathological conditions. This weakening of interaction pathways implies that smoking may inhibit the potential effectiveness of pharmacological treatments for psychological diseases by disrupting the metabolic-behavioral linkage. These insights underscore the complex role of smoking in modulating the delicate balance of microbiome-metabolism-behavior interactions.