Gut bacteria may influence alcoholics' liver damage

Last Updated: 2016-02-04

By Kathryn Doyle

(Reuters Health) - Differences among alcoholics in who develops severe liver damage and who doesn't might be partly due to differences in their gut microbes, suggests a new study.

"There is substantial inter-individual diversity in the susceptibility of alcoholics to liver injury," said senior study author Gabriel Perlemuter of Hopital Antoine-Beclere, in Clamart, France.

"Despite a similar amount of alcohol intake, some patients will develop severe liver lesions whereas others won't have any liver injury," Perlemuter told Reuters Health by email.

In the study, the researchers tested the intestinal microbe populations of 38 alcoholic patients. They found that people with more alcohol-induced liver lesions had more Bifidobacteria and Streptococci and less Atopobium than patients with no liver problems.

The researchers then transplanted the intestinal microbes from two people diagnosed with "excessive alcohol consumption," one of whom had severe alcoholic hepatitis and one with no hepatitis, into mice via fecal transplant, and watched how the mice responded when fed alcohol.

Mice with the microbes from a human with severe alcoholic hepatitis developed worse liver inflammation than other animals, more liver tissue death and greater intestinal permeability, according to the report online now in the journal Gut.

When the researchers then transplanted microbes from a human alcoholic without liver disease to the same mice, the liver lesions improved.

"Genetic susceptibility to liver disease does not explain all the individual susceptibilities to alcohol-induced liver injury," Perlemuter said.

It's not clear how many people in the population have protective gut microbiota, but answering this question will help develop future treatment or prevention of liver disease, he said.

"We want to clearly identify protective bacteria to use them as probiotics," Perlemuter said. "Such treatments may prevent or improve liver lesions."

This would be particularly important for patients with alcohol addiction who do not succeed in quitting alcohol entirely, he said.

"We think that all the physicians who treat patients with alcohol-induced liver disease and/or alcohol addiction should think about how to improve microbiota of their patient," but individual tests for intestinal microbiota are not currently available, Perlemuter said.

"This is the beginning of a story and we are currently working on this," he said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1R79mpz

Gut 2015.