Background
Antibiotic-responsive enteropathy (ARE) is diagnosed by excluding other causes of diarrhea and when there is a short-term response to administration of antibiotics. Objectives: To characterize the gut microbiota and clinical trend of dogs with suspected ARE and to evaluate the variation in microbiota before (T0), after 30 days (T30) of tylosin treatment, and 30 days after discontinuation of treatment (T60). A further
Methods
A multicentric prospective study. Clinical Indexes, fecal score, and samples for microbiota analysis were collected at T0, T30, and T60 in group A and T0 and T30 in group B. The gut microbiota was analyzed via 16S ribosomal RNA gene. Qiime2 version 2020.2 was used to perform bioinformatic analyses, and Alpha- and Beta-diversity were computed.
Results
Diarrhea recurred after T30 in 9 of 14 dogs, which were classified as affected by ARE. At T0, a difference was noted in the beta-diversity between groups (Bray Curtis metric P = .006). A T0-T30 difference in alpha-diversity was noted in group A (Shannon index P = .001, Faith PD P = .007). Conclusions and clinical importance: Although tylosin influences the microbiota of dogs with ARE, we failed to find any specific characteristic in the microbiota of dogs with ARE.