Four Gut Bacteria Decrease Asthma Risk in Infants by 1kiki

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Four Gut Bacteria Decrease Asthma Risk in Infants

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UPDATED: Sunday, October 25, 2015 15:09
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Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

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Four Gut Bacteria Decrease Asthma Risk in Infants
Fri, 10/02/2015 - 7:30am
University of British Columbia

New research by scientists at UBC and BC Children’s Hospital finds that infants can be protected from getting asthma if they acquire four types of gut bacteria by three months of age. More than 300 families from across Canada participated in this research through the Canadian Healthy Infant Longitudinal Development (CHILD) Study.

“This research supports the hygiene hypothesis that we’re making our environment too clean. It shows that gut bacteria play a role in asthma, but it is early in life when the baby’s immune system is being established,” said the study’s co-lead researcher B. Brett Finlay, Peter Wall Distinguished Professor in the Michael Smith Laboratories and the departments of microbiology & immunology and biochemistry and molecular biology at UBC.

Asthma rates have increased dramatically since the 1950s and now affect up to 20 per cent of children in western countries. The discovery opens the door to developing probiotic treatments for infants that prevent asthma. The finding could also be used to develop a test for predicting which children are at risk of developing asthma.

The researchers analyzed fecal samples from 319 children involved in the CHILD Study. Analysis of the gut bacteria from the samples revealed lower levels of four specific gut bacteria in three-month-old infants who were at an increased risk for asthma.

Most babies naturally acquire these four bacteria, nicknamed FLVR (Faecalibacterium, Lachnospira, Veillonella, Rothia), from their environments, but some do not, either because of the circumstances of their birth or other factors.

The researchers also found fewer differences in FLVR levels among one-year-old children, meaning the first three months are a critical time period for a baby’s developing immune system.

The researchers confirmed these findings in mice and also discovered that newborn mice inoculated with the FLVR bacteria developed less severe asthma.

“This discovery gives us new potential ways to prevent this disease that is life-threatening for many children. It shows there’s a short, maybe 100-day window for giving babies therapeutic interventions to protect against asthma,” said co-lead researcher Dr. Stuart Turvey, pediatric immunologist, BC Children’s Hospital, director of clinical research and senior clinician scientist at the Child & Family Research Institute, Aubrey J. Tingle Professor of Pediatric Immunology at UBC.

The researchers say that further study with a larger number of children is required to confirm these findings and reveal how these bacteria influence the development of asthma.

Source: University of British Columbia

http://www.the-scientist.com//?articles.view/articleNo/44143/title/Gut
-Bacteria-Linked-to-Asthma-Risk/

Gut Bacteria Linked to Asthma Risk

Four types of gut bacteria found in babies’ stool may help researchers predict the future development of asthma.

By Jef Akst | October 1, 2015

Babies with low levels of four types of common gut bacteria at 3 months of age tend to develop early signs of asthma by their first birthdays, according to a study published this week (September 30) in Science Translational Medicine.

Research has previously shown that infants given antibiotics are more prone to developing the breathing disorder. “[The research] puts a lot of epidemiological observations from over the years into a new perspective,” asthma researcher Marsha Wills-Karp of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, who was not involved in the latest work, told Science.

“There’s more and more evidence that modern illnesses derive from this loss of microbes—especially early in life,” New York University microbiologist Martin Blaser, who also did not participate in the research, told The Wall Street Journal. “The good germs are the ones we get from mom, and those guys are disappearing.”

To explore the association between antibiotic use and asthma risk, Brett Finlay of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and colleagues collected stool samples from more than 300 babies at 3 months of age. Sequencing the microbial DNA in the samples, the researchers identified four bacterial species—Lachnospira, Veillonella, Faecalibacterium, and Rothia—whose low or undetectable levels predicted with 100-percent accuracy whether the babies would suffer early signs of asthma, such as wheezing and skin allergies, by 1 year old. None of the infants with high levels of these bacteria in their stool at 3 months old developed such symptoms. The researchers also examined urine samples they’d collected from the 3-month-olds and found differences in the levels of bacterial byproducts between those who developed early signs of asthma and those who didn’t.

“What I think is important and not so surprising to pediatricians was how important the very early life is,” study coauthor Stuart Turvey of the University of British Columbia told The Verge. “And our study emphasizes that in that first 100 days the structure of the gut microbiome seems to be very important in influencing the immune responses that cause or protect us from asthma.”

The researchers also tested the effects of seeding the guts of germ-free mice with the stool samples they’d taken from the asthma-prone 3-month-olds. Sure enough, the animals developed inflamed lungs, a common symptom of asthma, suggesting causative role of the bacteria’s absence. Adding the four species of bacteria to the stool samples prior to seeding the mice’s digestive tracts rescued the condition.

“It’s not clear right now that there are ways to induce the growth of these particular bacteria in kids,” Wills-Karp told Science. “But it certainly starts to open the door toward that possibility.”

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