Specific Microbiota of the Lower Respiratory Tract in Patients with Various Forms of Pulmonary Tuberculosis according to Microbial Marker Testing Data

The objective: to identify differences in the composition of microbial markers detected by mass spectrometry of microbial markers in specimens of bronchial washings from patients with different clinical and radiological forms of tuberculosis. Subjects and Methods. Specific features of microbiota of the lower respiratory tract in patients with various forms of pulmonary tuberculosis receiving anti-tuberculosis therapy were studied. Results. Using mass spectrometry of microbial markers we studied bronchial washings obtained from the lung lobe with pathological changes and from another lung without pathology, which were selected according to computed tomography data. A high degree of inverse correlation was revealed between the number of markers of two groups of microorganisms: Group 1 (Clostridium ramosum + Corynebacterium spp. + Streptomyces spp.) and Group 2 (Eubacterium spp. + Eggerthella lenta + Lactobacillus spp. + Propionibacterium freudenreichii + Actinomyces viscosu + Prevotella spp. + Rhodococcus spp.) . It was found that when Group 2 microorganisms predominated, bronchial washings in 58.8% were obtained from fibrotic cavernous tuberculosis lesions. When Group 1 microorganisms predominated, bronchial washings were obtained from sites of resolving infiltrative tuberculosis (13.3%) or sites without pathological changes (46.6%).