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Lawton88
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Microbiome in the hair follicle of androgenetic alopecia patients
Androgenetic alopecia is the most common form of hair loss in males. It is a multifactorial condition involving genetic predisposition and hormonal changes. The role of microflora during hair loss remains to be understood. We therefore analyzed the microbiome of hair follicles from hair loss...
The distinct balding pattern in AGA is formed by progressive follicular miniaturization and subsequent balding on the vertex, while hair follicles on the occipital region remains typical. To investigate the association of microbiota with phenotype, PERMANOVA pairwise comparisons were performed between the occipital and vertex regions on patients and controls (Table 2). Overall, relative abundances of various genera in patient vertex (PV) were significantly different from control occipital (CO) and control vertex (CV) samples in middle and lower portions (P-value < 0.05) (Table 2A). We repeated PERMANOVA with the miniaturized samples removed, which resulted in no significant difference in the comparisons (Table 2B), suggesting that the change in microbiota is mainly associated with hair miniaturization. Comparison between the microbiota in miniaturized and non-miniaturized patient vertex samples showed that, in the middle portion, P. acnes abundance was increased with decreased Burkholderia spp. abundance; while M. komagatae, Sphingomonadaceae and Brevibacterium were decreased in the lower portion (Table 3A and 3B, Figs 3 and 4). In addition, PO lower portion was significantly different from CO; we found that P. acnes abundance increased with significance while Brevibacterium abundance decreased (Table 3C, Figs 3 and 4).
It has been reported that P. acnes and residential microflora of the hair and skin can elicit innate immune responses through toll like receptor 2 (TLR2) and up-regulation of anti-microbial peptides including β-defensin (DEFB1) [23, 24]. Through RNA sequencing of lower portion subset samples, several genes in antigen presentation and Th-1, Th-2 inflammatory pathways were found to be elevated in miniaturized hair follicles [25, 26]. Hence, we analyzed transcriptomic expression for genes involved in microbial response, the expression level of genes involved in responses to microbes such as Toll Like Receptor-2 (TLR2), DEFB1, Interferon regulatory factor 1 (IRF1), monocyte marker CD14, and Langerhans cell marker CD1a/CD207 were increased in miniaturized compared to non-miniaturized hair follicles [27–29] (Fig 5). These changes suggest that elevated immune responses and immune cell infiltration corresponded with increased P. acnes abundance.
