Qi Zheng,1,* Yuetong Li,1,* Wenfeng Zhu,1 Xiang Xu,2 Guoping Sheng,3 Lanjuan Li1 

1State Key Laboratory for Diagnosis and Treatment of Infectious Diseases, National Clinical Research Center for Infectious Diseases, National Medical Center for Infectious Diseases, Collaborative Innovation Center for Diagnosis and Treatment of Infectious Diseases, The First Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou, People’s Republic of China; 2Zhejiang Chinese Medical University, Hangzhou, People’s Republic of China; 3Key Laboratory of Artificial Organs and Computational Medicine in Zhejiang Province, Shulan (Hangzhou) Hospital Affiliated to Zhejiang Shuren University, Shulan International Medical College, Hangzhou, People’s Republic of China

*These authors contributed equally to this work

Correspondence: Guoping Sheng, Key Laboratory of Artificial Organs and Computational Medicine in Zhejiang Province, Shulan (Hangzhou) Hospital Affiliated to Shulan International Medical College, Zhejiang Shuren University, 848 Dongxin Road, Hangzhou, 310000, People’s Republic of China, Email guoping.sheng@shulan.com Lanjuan Li, State Key Laboratory for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Infectious Diseases, The First Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, 79 Qingchun Road, Hangzhou, 310003, People’s Republic of China, Email ljli@zju.edu.cn

Background: Previous studies have indicated that human flora may affect the development of scabies, however, no studies have proven a causal relationship between human flora and scabies, which would be detrimental to future in-depth studies on human flora and scabies.
Methods: Mendelian randomization (MR) was used to analyze the causal effect between human microbiota and scabies, with data on intestinal flora and skin flora from two large published studies and data on scabies from the FinnGen database. Five MR analysis methods were used to increase the reliability of the results, and sensitivity analyses were conducted to increase the robustness of the results.
Results: Our results suggest that 13 intestinal flora as well as 7 skin flora can have a causal effect on scabies.
Conclusion: Overall, our results demonstrate a causal relationship between intestinal and skin flora and scabies and are consistent with previous observational findings. This will contribute to the future development of probiotic agents for the prevention or treatment of scabies.

Keywords: gut microbiota, skin microbiota, scabies, FinnGen, Mendelian randomization