by RICH HARIDY
Canadian researchers are reporting allergies that develop in a baby’s initial year of life could be predicted by analyzing their first poo after birth. The study claims one’s microbial make-up at birth can play a major role in early immune development.
That notorious first bowel movement from a newborn baby is known as meconium and it contains a wide variety of materials ingested while in utero. Metabolites found in meconium can not only indicate what a baby was exposed to while gestating, but offer unique insight into what drives early development of an infant’s gut microbiome.
“Meconium is like a time capsule, revealing what the infant was exposed to before it was born,” explains lead author on the new research, Charisse Petersen. “It contains all sorts of molecules encountered and accumulated from the mother while in the womb, and it then becomes the initial food source for the earliest gut microbes.”
The new research set out to investigate whether patterns of biomarkers in a baby’s meconium could predict allergy development in the first year of life. Samples of meconium from 100 infants were analyzed and a link was detected between metabolic diversity in this first stool and allergic sensitization at one year.
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