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Birth method, gestation duration linked to infants' gut microbiota: study

Xinhua, February 4, 2015 Adjust font size:

Pre-birth 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, a study said Tuesday.

Babies who were vaginally delivered and had longer gestations before birth tended to more quickly develop a more mature gut microbiota, and had more body fat at 18 months than those who were born via caesarean section and had shorter gestations, the study said.

"It seems like the early environment ... may be influencing the rate at which babies acquire their gut microbiota," senior author Joanna Holbrook of the Singapore Institute for Clinical Sciences said in a statement. "And that in turn has an association with how babies grow and put on body fat."

Human infants start accumulating intestinal microbiota at birth until a relatively stable state is reached, Holbrook said. And the rate at which babies acquire gut microbiota is believed to have a considerable impact on later health outcomes.

In the study, Holbrook, in collaboration with researchers from Nestle Research Center in Switzerland and an international alliance called the EpiGen Consortium, looked at 75 infants who were all born at term.

They used a technique called 16s rRNA sequencing to analyze the infants' stool samples, investigating the effect of environmental factors including delivery mode and duration of gestation on trajectories of microbial development, along with the associative relationships with later body fat.

The samples were taken when the infants were three days old, three weeks old, three months old and six months old.

Their work found that those who were delivered vaginally had a more mature, six month-like microbiota profile that is high in the bacteria Bifidobacterium and Collinsella by day three. Other babies took up to six months to reach that stage.

Babies delivered vaginally also had typical body fat at age 18 months, while those born via caesarean section had relatively low body fat, they added.

The findings were published in the U.S. journal mBio. Endite