Microbiota and Postmenopause: The resilience of intestinal bacteria in the face of female hormonal aging

Abstract

Background Female aging is characterized by a decline in ovarian function until the establishment of the post-menopausal state. Other research lines seek to understand how the gut microbiota contributes to these diseases at all stages of life, including post-menopause, and its potential to be used as an ally to promote healthy aging and as a biomarker that can be associated with the pre-and post-menopausal period. Methods Post-menopausal women (n = 44) aged between 45 and 60, divided into Group A n = 34 (up to 10 years postmenopause) and Group B n = 10 (more than 10 years postmenopause) had fecal samples analyzed by metabarcoding using the 16S rRNA gene, and bacterial composition and diversity were compared between the two groups. Results Both groups showed high diversity in microbiota according to Shannon’s index but with no difference. Simpson’s index indicated that post-menopausal women over 10 had a more diverse microbiota with lower species dominance (p-value 0.04). The predominant organisms were Phyla Firmicutes, Bacteroidota, Proteobacteria, and Actinobacteria; Families Lachnospiraceae, Bacteroidaceae, Ruminococcaceae, Prevotellaceae; Genera Bacteroides, Prevotella, Faecalibacterium, Agathobacter and Dialister. There were no differences between the groups. Conclusion Women who had been post-menopausal for ten years or more had microbiota with greater diversity and less dominance of taxa. There was no difference between the ten most enriched taxa in each group. Our results indicated that the fecal Microbiota of these women showed a uniform and equitable distribution of the organisms inferred for the groups, regardless of the time elapsed since postmenopause.