We thank Liu et al for their interest in our paper and for providing their thoughts through correspondence.1 We agree that gut microbiome studies are promising to identify novel insights into the sexual dimorphism in rheumatoid arthritis (RA). We reported that the genus of Gardnerella and the species of Gardnerella vaginalis increased in the gut microbiome of patients with RA.2 G. vaginalis is known as a representative causal bacterium of vaginosis. In our study, G. vaginalis was detected in both male and female samples, and there were no significant gender differences in their relative abundance ( P =0.41). Thus, the increment of G. vaginalis was less likely to be contamination from the female genital organ in perineum. We further performed case-control association tests of G. vaginalis stratified by gender with age, sequencing groups and the top two principal components as covariates (figure 1A). We found that the effect size was larger in female …

中文翻译：

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回应：“类风湿性关节炎的性别二态性能否归因于加德纳菌的不同丰度？” 刘等人

我们感谢 Liu 等人对我们的论文感兴趣并通过通信提供了他们的想法。1 我们同意肠道微生物组研究有望发现对类风湿性关节炎 (RA) 性别二态性的新见解。我们报道了 RA 2 患者肠道微生物组中加德纳菌属和阴道加德纳菌属增加。阴道加德纳菌被认为是阴道病的代表性致病菌。在我们的研究中，在男性和女性样本中都检测到了 G.阴道菌，并且它们的相对丰度没有显着的性别差异（ P = 0.41）。因此，G.阴道菌的增加不太可能是来自会阴部女性生殖器官的污染。我们进一步进行了按性别和年龄分层的 G.阴道菌的病例对照关联测试，测序组和前两个主成分作为协变量（图 1A）。我们发现女性的效应量更大……