I wish to give a special thanks to Juan Pablo C., Assistant professor in Universidad Mayor, Chile and former Senior Bioinformatician for uBiome for bringing to my attention the article below. He was then kind enough to point me at appropriate data sources to allow me to implement this new measure.

Oral bacteria relative abundance in faeces increases due to gut microbiota depletion and is linked with patient outcomes

The detection of oral bacteria in faecal samples has been associated with inflammation and intestinal diseases. The increased relative abundance of oral bacteria in faeces has two competing explanations: either oral bacteria invade the gut ecosystem and expand (the ‘expansion’ hypothesis), or oral bacteria transit through the gut and their relative increase marks the depletion of other gut bacteria (the ‘marker’ hypothesis). … By distinguishing between the two hypotheses, our study guides the interpretation of microbiome compositional data and could potentially identify cases where therapies are needed to rebuild the resident microbiome rather than protect against invading oral bacteria.

Oral bacteria relative abundance in faeces increases due to gut microbiota depletion and is linked with patient outcomes [May 2024]

62% of shared ASVs (Bacteria) were more abundant in the oral cavity, indicating that oral-to-gut translocation may be the main route of translocation between environments, and highlighting that this phenomenon might be more common than previously thought in healthy individuals of all ages.

The oral-gut microbiota relationship in healthy humans: identifying shared bacteria between environments and age groups [2024]

I have implemented a new measure on Microbiome Prescription to estimate the amount of leakage. It is located in the Health Analysis section (a large and often slow loading page)

The report gives a percentile ranking based on the total for genus that are Oral Bacteria and then lists the specific genus and species present

As with other study specific pages, you can hand select bacteria of interest or click on the bacteria to get more information about the bacteria. Of special note is Prevotella being listed as there is evidence suggesting that it increases due to fungi in the environment – thus the gut microbiome depletion is likely why it can take up residency.

I will be looking to modify the suggestions algorithms to exclude oral bacteria and thus have the suggestions focused on gut microbiota depletion as a treatment option.