Environmental factors like mode of delivery and
duration of gestation may affect how infants’ gut
bacteria mature, and that rate could help predict
later body fat, international researchers from the
EpiGen consortium have found in collaboration with
scientists at Nestlé Research Center in Switzerland.
The work is published this week in mBio®, the online
open-access journal of the American Society for
Microbiology.
Among a group of 75 infants, those who were
vaginally delivered and had a longer gestation
before birth tended to more quickly develop a more
mature gut microbiota, and had typical body fat at
18 months. By contrast, babies who were delivered
via Caesarean section and had shorter gestations
took longer to acquire a more mature gut microbiota
and had lower body fat at 18 months.
“It seems like the early environment, for instance
mode of delivery, mode of feeding, the duration of
gestation and living environment may be influencing
the rate at which babies acquire their gut
microbiota,” said senior study author Joanna
Holbrook, a senior principal investigator at the
Singapore Institute for Clinical Sciences, “and that
in turn has an association with how babies grow and
put on body fat.”
At birth, human infants start accumulating
intestinal microbiota until a relatively stable
state is reached, Holbrook said. The rate at which
babies acquire gut microbiota is believed to have a
considerable impact on later health outcomes.
For the study, Holbrook and colleagues used a
laboratory technique called 16s rRNA sequencing to
analyze stool samples that had been collected from
75 infants participating in the GUSTO (Growing Up in
Singapore Toward Healthy Outcomes) study, which
includes members of the three main ethnic groups in
Singapore: Chinese, Indian and Malay.
The samples were taken when the infants were three
days old, three weeks old, three months old and six
months old.
GUSTO, which aims to evaluate the role of
developmental factors in the early pathways to
metabolic disease, is Singapore's largest birth
cohort study to date.
Study coauthors were from the Yong Loo Lin School of
Medicine in Singapore; KKH Woman’s and Children’s
Hospital in Singapore; and the MRC Lifecourse
Epidemiology Unit and NIHR Southampton Biomedical
Research Centre, United Kingdom. The work was
supported by the National Research Foundation of
Singapore, the Agency for Science and Technology
Research (A*STAR) and Nestlé. The article can be
found online at
http://mbio.asm.org/content/6/1/e02419-14.
For more information
Dynamics of Infant Gut Microbiota Are Influenced by
Delivery Mode and Gestational Duration and Are
Associated with Subsequent Adiposity
MDN |