eHealth: Disease activity measures are related to the faecal gut microbiota in adult patients with ulcerative colitis

Microbial dysbiosis in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is poorly understood. Faecal samples collected for the purposes of microbiota analysis are not yet a part of everyday clinical practice. To explore associations between faecal microbiota and disease activity measures in adult IBD patients, for the purpose of possibly integrating microbiota measures in an existing IBD eHealth application for disease-monitoring.We collected faecal samples from adult IBD patients for one year while they were home-monitoring for disease activity, using faecal calprotectin (FC) and the Simple Clinical Colitis Activity Index (SCCAI). Faecal samples were analysed in two different ways: commercially available test consisting of 54 pre-determined bacterial markers (DNA test) and 16S rRNA gene sequencing (16S-seq). Univariable linear mixed effect models were fitted to predict disease scores using normalised relative abundances as fixed effects.Seventy-eight IBD patients provided a total of 288 faecal samples for microbiota analysis. Two hundred and thirty-four of the samples were from patients with ulcerative colitis (UC).In patients with UC, results of both methods are associated with disease activity, correlating significantly with