Another Look at the Contribution of Oral Microbiota to the Pathogenesis of Rheumatoid Arthritis: A Narrative Review

Although autoimmunity contributes to rheumatoid arthritis (RA), several lines of evidence challenge the dogma that it is mainly an autoimmune disorder. As RA-associated human leukocyte antigens shape microbiomes and increase the risk of dysbiosis in mucosae, RA might rather be induced by epigenetic changes in long-lived synovial presenting cells, stressed by excessive translocations into joints of bacteria from the poorly cultivable gut, lung, or oral microbiota (in the same way as more pathogenic bacteria can lead to “reactive arthritis”). This narrative review (i) lists evidence supporting this scenario, including the identification of DNA from oral and gut microbiota in the RA synovium (but in also healthy synovia), and the possibility of translocation through blood, from mucosae to joints, of microbiota, either directly from the oral cavity or from the gut, following an increase of gut permeability worsened by migration within the gut of oral bacteria such as Porphyromonas gingivalis; (ii) suggests other methodologies for future works other than cross-sectional studies of periodontal microbiota in cohorts of patients with RA versus controls, namely, longitudinal studies of oral, gut, blood, and synovial microbiota combined with transcriptomic analyses of immune cells in individual patients at risk of RA, and in overt RA, before, during, and following flares of RA.