Infant gut microbes altered by the mother's obesity increases risk of obesity and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) later in life for the infant. Obesity has increased substantially in the past decade, predictions are that 57% of children today will be obese by the age of 35. Not coincidentally, maternal obesity rates are almost 40%. A study done at University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus looked at stool of two week old infants born to normal weight mothers and obese mothers. The stool samples were taken and colonized them in germ-free mice. The results were interesting, gut microbes from babies born from obese mothers showed metabolic and inflammatory changes in the liver and bone marrow cells of these mice. The mice were fed a high fat diet, these mice had much more rapid weight gain and fattier livers than the other group of mice. The results suggest changes in the gut microbiome in infants from an obese mother can directly start disease pathways such as NAFLD (Soderborg, et al., 2018). This research is important because it shows that the microbiome can cause the disease rather than being associated with it. More research needs to be done on understanding how probiotics could possibly reduce the risk of obesity and liver diseases.
Citation
Soderborg, T. K., Clark, S. E., Mulligan, C. E., Janssen, R. C., Babcock, L., Ir, D., Lemas, D. J., Johnson, L. K., Weir, T., Lenz, L. L., Frank, D. N., Hernandez, T. L., Kuhn, K. A., D'Alessandro, A., Barbour, L. A., El Kasmi, K. C., Friedman, J. E. (2018). The gut microbiota in infants of obese mothers increases inflammation and susceptibility to NAFLD. Nature communications, 9(1), 4462. doi:10.1038/s41467-018-06929-0
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