Emerging Trends in the Skin Microbiome

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Hi, I'm Dr. Windy Cole. I'm the Director of Research at Kent State University College of Podiatric Medicine, and I'm here to talk to you about one of the posters I have at SAWC Spring that looks at the microbiome of the foot.

And in this project, we compared samples taken for patients with and without diabetes. We know that the skin really has a wide array of microorganisms that live on its surface, bacterial, fungal, even yeast, and that's as part of the normal colonization of the skin, but I wanted to look at if there was a difference between the microbiome and patients that have diabetes and those that don't. So we took tissue samples in cohort of patients, there was 100 patients, 15 each group, those having diabetes and those without.

We took it from different topography In different habitats with the foot, we took samples from in between each patient's toes and on the planter surface of the balls of the feet. And we prepared this through a next generation sequencing to see exactly what the microbiome was in this patient population. Now, this is an initial analysis, which still kind of sifted through the data.

We received a lot of data and subsequently we're going to have a manuscript. But this poster looked at our initial findings and there was a variance in the different bacteria. Both groups had an overgrowth of many different bacterial species.

All specimens had overgrowth of some bacterial species And close to 80% of all samples had an overgrowth of many fungal diseases as well. But between the folks with diabetes and those without, we saw that there was an increased number of very pathologic bacteria on the patients that had a history of diabetes. And so the next stages to determine does the comorbidity of diabetes increase the propensity for skin breakdown.

What does it do to overall skin health? I think that can help us with prevention strategies and then also develop appropriate treatment pathways when patients with diabetes develop diabetic symptoms.