ReviewThe Lancet. Microbe2022
Causal discovery for the microbiome.
Review in The Lancet. Microbe, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed, 37 citations in OpenAlex.
- The gut-pancreas axis: microbial dysbiosis as a pathogenic driver of diabetes and pancreatic cancer.Medical oncology (Northwood, London, England) · 2026Review
- Causal risk factors for stroke, delirium, and mortality after elective and urgent open aortic arch surgery for older adults.GeroScience · 2026Article
- From association to causality: mechanistic pathways linking the gut microbiome to psychiatric disorders.Translational psychiatry · 2026Review
- The Gut Microbiome in Early Ontogeny: Implications for Brain and Immune System Development.Journal of developmental biology · 2026Review
- Article
- Cross-cohort resistome and virulome gradients structure the colorectal cancer microbiome.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2026Article
- Redefining feed efficiency through the livestock gut microbiome.Frontiers in physiology · 2026Article
- A data-driven universal gut microbiome health assessment: a machine learning framework trained on large metagenomic data.Frontiers in microbiology · 2026Article
- Gut-placenta axis: gut microbiota metabolites may play a role in regulating maternal-fetal immune tolerance and the pathogenesis of adverse pregnancy outcomes.Frontiers in immunology · 2026Review
- Personalized colorectal cancer risk assessment through explainable AI and Gut microbiome profiling.Gut microbes · 2025Article
- HILAMA: High-dimensional multi-omics mediation analysis with latent confounding.BMC medical research methodology · 2025Article
- Programmable conjugative CRISPR interference targeting genotoxin in the gut.Research square · 2025Article
- Programmable conjugative CRISPR interference targeting genotoxin in the gut.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Identifying Optimal Machine Learning Approaches for Human Gut Microbiome (Shotgun Metagenomics) and Metabolomics Integration with Stable Feature Selection.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Assessing the health of the gut microbial organ: why and how?The Journal of clinical investigation · 2025Article
- The lung microbiome in interstitial lung disease.Breathe (Sheffield, England) · 2025Review
- Profiling the gut and oral microbiota of hormone receptor-positive, HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer patients receiving pembrolizumab and eribulin.Microbiome research reports · 2025Article
- Classifying compounds as prebiotics - scientific perspectives and recommendations.Nature reviews. Gastroenterology & hepatology · 2025Review
- Characterising functional redundancy in microbiome communities via relative entropy.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2025Article
- Structural Equation Modelling as a Proof-of-Concept Tool for Mediation Mechanisms Between Topical Antibiotic Prophylaxis and Six Types of Blood Stream Infection Among ICU Patients.Antibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Measurement and manipulation of the microbiome is generally considered to have great potential for understanding the causes of complex diseases in humans, developing new therapies, and finding preventive measures. Many studies have found significant associations between the microbiome and various diseases; however, Koch's classical postulates remind us about the importance of causative reasoning when considering the relationship between microbes and a disease manifestation. Although causal discovery in observational microbiome data faces many challenges, methodological advances in causal structure learning have improved the potential of data-driven prediction of causal effects in large-scale biological systems. In this Personal View, we show the capability of existing methods for inferring causal effects from metagenomic data, and we highlight ways in which the introduction of causal structures that are more flexible than existing structures offers new opportunities for causal reasoning. Our observations suggest that microbiome research can further benefit from tools developed in the past 5 years in causal discovery and learn from their applications elsewhere.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.