Background: Waldeyer lymphatic ring surrounds the nasopharynx and oropharynx, and no study to date has correlated its microbiome with the severity of oral mucositis (OM) in patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) receiving chemoradiotherapy.
Methods: We performed 16S rRNA sequencing to characterize bacterial microbiome in tumor-affected nasopharynx and the surrounding normal oropharynx. We plotted the abundance and diversity of bacterial taxa and their phylogenetic distance and networks to visualize and compare the differences in pretreatment overall bacterial communities between the nasopharynx and oropharynx in patients with NPC with varying degrees of chemoradiotherapy-induced OM and quality of life.
Results: We found microbial signatures in nasopharynx around NPC were not only dissimilar to those in the surrounding oropharynx but were almost unique to each patient. The genetic distance metrics further showed that different tumor microbiota distributions in the nasopharynx among patients with NPC were well-correlated with OM severity and quality of life during chemoradiotherapy.
Conclusions: At Waldeyer ring, the tumor-associated microbiome risk profiles of the respiratory region of nasopharynx, but not commensal microbiota of the alimentary region of oropharynx, could be noninvasive biomarkers for OM susceptibility and might include drug targets for the prevention of chemoradiation-induced OM in patients with Waldeyer ring-derived NPC.
Keywords: Waldeyer ring; chemoradiotherapy; microbiome; nasopharyngeal carcinoma; oral mucositis.
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