The gut microbiome is a collective term for the trillions of different microbes living within the human gut, which are essential for developmental processes in early life, such as building immunity, hormone production, and metabolism of certain nutrients.
Until now, most of the research on the gut microbiome’s role in child development is from high-income settings, not in low- and middle-income countries, where childhood infections and mortality are much higher, and where undernutrition affects more than 1 in 5 children.
The study was carried out by researchers from the Queen Mary University of London, the University of British Columbia, and Devil’s Staircase Consulting, Canada. They used metagenome sequencing technologies to analyze the gut microbiome of 335 children from rural Zimbabwe, aged 1 to 18 months.
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The children were given two interventions as part of The Sanitation Hygiene Infant Nutrition Efficacy (SHINE) randomized control trial. The first intervention was an improvement in infant and young child feeding. This included providing a nutritional supplement called ‘nutributter’ from 6-18 months of age.
The second intervention was an improvement in household water, sanitation, and hygiene. This started during pregnancy and included building new pit latrines, handwashing stations, providing chlorinated drinking water, and dedicated child playpens.
Surprisingly, the results showed that these interventions had very little effect on the children’s gut microbiomes, suggesting that more intensive interventions are required to alter the microbes that colonize the infant gut in early life in these settings.
They also found that genetic functions of the gut microbes, such as B vitamin metabolism, can predict how well a child is growing or will grow, in the following months.
As child growth is strongly associated with immune development, brain development, and other developmental processes, this new microbiome data provides a new target for interventions to optimize these growth and developmental pathways in children at risk.
This study provides the scientific community with a very large resource of gut microbiome data from children in rural, non-Western settings throughout early childhood, which will allow researchers around the world to analyze and compare with similar datasets from children in high-income settings.
This study also provides important data for public health in low-and-middle-income countries where early-life infections, diarrheal disease, child mortality, and undernutrition are much more common.
Source: Eurekalert
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