Analysis of the intestinal flora in patients with primary liver cancer*

Abstract Objective To investigate the differences in intestinal flora of patients with primary liver cancer and of healthy individuals and to investigate the effect of the differential flora on the development of liver cancer. Methods Overall, 67 patients with primary liver cancer who received systematic and complete treatment between January 2019 and December 2020 at the Sixth People’s Hospital of Qingdao and had complete clinical data were enrolled in this study, and 26 individuals who were healthy on physical examination in the same period were used as healthy controls. Macro genome and 16s ribosome Deoxyribo Nucleic Acid (rDNA) high-throughput sequencing were performed on the stool flora of the enrolled patients and controls, and the differences in the intestinal flora were analyzed using the LEfSe bioinformatics software. Results Compared with the control samples, all the tested patient samples showed statistically significant differences in the number of colonies of 5 bacterial phyla, 5 orders, 8 families, 11 genera, and 14 species ( P < 0.05). Conclusion Compared with healthy people, patients with primary liver cancer have significant differences in the intestinal flora composition. The alteration of the intestinal flora may be correlated with the occurrence of primary liver cancer, and the intestinal flora may become a novel target for the prevention and treatment of primary liver cancer.