Paired Exploratory Metagenomic Analysis of Gut Microbiota Before and After Ceftizoxime Treatment in College Students with Acute Enteritis.

This study explored the short-term changes in gut microbiota concurrent with ceftizoxime sodium therapy and clinical recovery in college students with acute enteritis. A retrospective, self-controlled before-and-after design was adopted, enrolling 10 college students (5 males, 5 females; aged 18-24 years) with acute enteritis admitted to Southwest University Hospital. Fecal samples were collected before intravenous antibiotic treatment and at the time of clinical recovery (5-7 days later). All patients received intravenous ceftizoxime sodium (1.0 g every 12 h). Metagenomic sequencing was performed to analyze microbiota composition and diversity. We hypothesized that short-term ceftizoxime therapy would induce detectable species-level restructuring without substantially altering higher-level diversity. Phylum-level analyses showed no statistically significant differences between the two groups. Also, α-diversity analysis at the genus level revealed that the Shannon, Simpson, and Chao1 showed no differences between the two groups (q = 0.054, 0.054 and 0.084, respectively). PERMANOVA based on Bray-Curtis distances at the genus level demonstrated a statistically significant difference in overall microbial community structure between the two groups before and after treatment (F = 1.81, P = 0.043), but no significant difference after adjustment (P = 0.054). ANOSIM performed on the raw full-species abundance table at the species level further detected significant separation between the two groups (R = 0.114, P = 0.016). No species remained statistically significant after false-discovery-rate correction. These exploratory, descriptive findings indicate that species-level temporal changes in the gut microbiota occurred concurrently with ceftizoxime exposure and clinical recovery, but cannot be attributed specifically to the antibiotic. The study provides hypothesis-generating data for future controlled investigations of antibiotic-microbiota interactions in young adults.