The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) represent a vast ensemble of 400 million habitants who share a common anthropological background and civilizational traits that generate a profound homogeneity. The region is of paramount importance for us with four established members of the Institut Pasteur International Network (Casablanca, Algiers, Tunis, and Tehran). MENA benefited in the last decades from a significant reduction of communicable diseases burden, but, meanwhile, changes affecting the way of living including urbanization and nutritional transition led to an increase of non-communicable diseases that include metabolic diseases such as diabetes or heart diseases but also malignancies. MENA is known as one of the regions (with the United States of America) with the highest rates of overweight/obesity and Type-2 Diabetes (T2D). Unfortunately, metabolic disorders are currently affecting MENA populations as early as infancy or childhood, a situation predicted to generate deleterious health consequences for the future grown-up generations. Dysmetabolic conditions emerged recently as a major cause of morbidity for the liver and they represent important risk factors for terminal diseases such as cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). As an outcome of such a deteriorated epidemiological situation, cirrhosis represents currently the 6th cause of death in the region and HCC incidence had massively increased in the past decades.
In recent years, connections between obesity or T2D and the gut microbiota have been unraveled. Initially observed in mouse models, these links were extended to humans. The epidemiological context of MENA conducts us to hypothesize that alterations of the gut microbiota might explain the progression of chronic liver disease in patients from the region. The main objective of our project is to characterize by 16S sequencing the gut microbiota of a large series of patients originating from Iran and Morocco.
