Recent advances of gut microbiota in chronic kidney disease patients

Abstract

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a worldwide public health issue and has ultimately progressed to an end-stage renal disease that requires life-long dialysis or renal transplantation. However, the underlying molecular mechanism of these pathological development and progression remains to be fully understood. The human gut microbiota is made up of approximately 100 trillion microbial cells including anaerobic and aerobic species. In recent years, more and more evidence has indicated a clear association between dysbiosis of gut microbiota and CKD including immunoglobulin A (IgA) nephropathy, diabetic kidney disease, membranous nephropathy, chronic renal failure and end-stage renal disease. The current review describes gut microbial dysbiosis and metabolites in patients with CKD thus helping to understand human disease. Treatment with prebiotics, probiotics and natural products can attenuate CKD through improving dysbiosis of gut microbiota, indicating a novel intervention strategy in patients with CKD. This review also discusses therapeutic options, such as prebiotics, probiotics and natural products, for targeting dysbiosis of gut microbiota in patients to provide more specific concept-driven therapy strategy for CKD treatment.