Starving the Gut: A Deficit of Butyrate in the Intestinal Ecosystem of Children With Intestinal Failure
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Intestinal epithelial integrity is influenced by short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) and is of critical importance for children with intestinal failure (IF) given the known devastating infectious and gastrointestinal complications. The composition of the microbiome in IF represents an important variable in the physiology and prognosis of this disease. AIM: We sought to compare the intestinal microbiome and SCFA concentration of children who require parenteral nutrition (PN) with that of children with short-bowel syndrome (SBS) who have discontinued PN and with age-matched controls, using high-throughput sequencing to investigate host-microbe interactions. METHODS: Fifty-three samples were submitted over 6-15 months. Six children with SBS + IF submitted 34 samples, and 6 children with SBS with discontinued PN submitted 15 samples; these were compared with samples from 5 control children. Fecal samples were analyzed by 16S ribosomal RNA partial gene sequencing using the MiSeq Illumina sequencer. SCFAs were measured in stool samples by mass spectrometry. RESULTS: Butyrate quantity was near absent in children with IF compared with that in controls (median 0.37 nmol/mg vs 10.92 nmol/mg; P < .0001). Similarly, commensal anaerobes known to produce SCFA, including Ruminococcaceae and Lachnospiraceae, were reduced in those with SBS. SBS + IF enteric samples demonstrated a 168-fold increase in the relative abundance of the Escherichia genus seemingly attributable to the species Escherichia coli. CONCLUSION: The reduced relative abundance of butyrate-producing Clostridia as well as decreased intestinal butyrate concentration in children with IF support further investigation in therapeutic options that target butyrate-producing bacterial communities or butyrate supplementation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".