Shaping Tiny Lives Via Altered Infant Gut Bacteria

Team of developmental psychology researchers has discovered that infants who spent the majority of their first year during the COVID pandemic have a reduced variety of gut bacteria, highlighting potential ramifications for their physical and mental health (1^✔ ✔Trusted Source
A comparison of the infant gut microbiome before versus after the start of the covid-19 pandemic

Go to source) The findings, published in Scientific Reports, showed that infants whose gut microbes were sampled during the pandemic had lower alpha diversity of the gut microbiome, meaning that there were fewer species of bacteria in the gut.

The infants had a lower abundance of Pasteurellaceae and Haemophilus—bacteria that live within humans and can cause various infections—and significantly different beta diversity, which tells us how similar or dissimilar the gut microbiome for the two groups may be.

The authors indicate in their article that the differences may have been influenced “by the social changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, with infants potentially experiencing more time at home, less time in daycare interacting with other children, increased hygiene in the environment, changes to diet and breastfeeding practices, and increased caregiver stress…”

Gut Changes in Pandemic Babies

“The COVID-19 pandemic provides a rare natural experiment to help us better understand how the social environment shapes the infant gut microbiome, and this study contributes to a growing field of research about how changes to an infant’s social environment might be associated with changes to the gut microbiome,” says Sarah C. Vogel, the article’s co-lead author and recent doctoral graduate from NYU Steinhardt’s Developmental Psychology program.

For their study, the authors compared stool samples of two socioeconomically and racially diverse groups of 12-month-olds living in New York City that were provided before the pandemic (34 infants) and between March and December of 2020 (20 infants).

The authors say that while speculating on the health implications of gut microbiome differences should be done cautiously, gut diversity has been linked to health outcomes across the lifespan.

“In adults, we know that lower diversity of the microbiota species in the gut has been linked to poorer physical and mental health,” says Natalie Brito, senior author and associate professor at NYU Steinhardt.

Advertisement

“But more research is needed on the development of the gut microbiome during infancy and how the early caregiving environment can shape those connections.”

Reference:

1. A comparison of the infant gut microbiome before versus after the start of the covid-19 pandemic - (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-40102-y)

Advertisement

Source-Eurekalert