Recent research shows a link between gut bacteria and blood bile acids with the severity of fibromyalgia symptoms. The new study also suggests a biological marker that could help determine a diagnosis.
Fibromyalgia affects approximately 4% of the population and mostly women. Fibromyalgia is difficult to diagnose, has no cure, and causes pain, fatigue, and cognitive problems.
In 2019, researchers found a link between changes in the gut microbiome and fibromyalgia. In this study, they found evidence that patients with fibromyalgia show different amounts and species of bile-metabolizing gut bacteria, as well as different concentrations of bile acids in the blood, compared to healthy people. They also found a correlation to the severity of symptoms.
These findings are important because they could help with the development of diagnostic and therapeutic tools for people suffering from fibromyalgia.
Human bile acids help the body digest fats and oils as well as perform other biological activities. Once metabolized in the gut, they are recirculated to the liver and blood and become secondary bile acids.
In this study, comparing 42 healthy women with 42 women with fibromyalgia, the researchers observed that bile-metabolizing bacteria that were more abundant in the gut were not identical in both groups and that women with fibromyalgia had significant alterations in their serum concentration of secondary bile acids.
“The change in bile acids that we observed in patients with fibromyalgia in our study is distinct enough to be used as an effective biological signature to detect individuals with fibromyalgia. That’s an important step forward, considering that diagnosing fibromyalgia is often a long process that requires eliminating other conditions that can cause similar symptoms,” says Amir Minerbi, joint first author of the study, who transitioned from the Alan Edwards Pain Management Unit at the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) to Rambam’s Institute for Pain Medicine during the time of the study.
The team used artificial intelligence to determine the presence of six specific secondary bile acids was sufficient to predict by over 90% accuracy if an individual within the study had fibromyalgia.
“Machine and statistical learning have helped us to characterize which gut bacteria change in abundance and which human bile acids are important makers of the disease,” says joint first author Emmanuel Gonzalez, PhD, from the Canadian Center for Computational Genomics and the human genetics department at McGill.
“These approaches provided an accurate biological signature of fibromyalgia and, although our study cohort was relatively small, these findings are a promising sign that artificial intelligence might be able to considerably enhance accurate diagnosis of the disease.”
The researchers collected stool and blood samples from the participants for microbiome bacteria analysis. To determine links between the observed biochemical changes and the severity of symptoms, they asked participants with fibromyalgia to self-assess their pain, fatigue, sleep quality, and cognitive and somatic problems. They also provided self-assessment on muscular stiffness, depression, anxiety, fatigue, physical functioning, and work difficulties.
The researchers identified a secondary bile acid called alpha-muricholic acid (aMCA) that was on average five times less present in fibromyalgia patients than in healthy participants. They found that its presence was negatively correlated with most of the syndrome symptoms, including pain, fatigue, unrefreshing sleep, and cognitive complaints.
“If this is corroborated in future studies, we may be exploring a potential new mechanism involving one specific secondary bile acid that influences chronic pain,” says senior author Yoram Shir of the Alan Edwards Pain Management Unit.
The researchers used DNA sequencing to pinpoint links between serum bile acid concentrations and various clinical variables. The analyses confirmed that at least some of the observed differences in the patients’ microbiome composition and bile metabolizing bacteria were likely to be attributed to fibromyalgia, rather than to other individual or environmental factors.
“For example, irritable bowel syndrome and depressive disorder are common among individuals with fibromyalgia, but we were able to demonstrate that alterations to specific bile acids associated with fibromyalgia were not correlated with these conditions,” says bioinformatics expert Emmanuel Gonzalez.
Because diet plays such a significant role in the makeup of the gut microbiome, the researchers performed analyses on the diets of each participant. They found no links between their diets and symptoms.
“Our findings show a strong relationship between patient microbiome composition, bile acids, and the severity of fibromyalgia symptoms. Understanding the biological mechanism of fibromyalgia is critical, because it shows that this condition is real, and because it brings us closer to developing an effective treatment to these women and men in pain,” says Shir.