Asthma Connection to Infant Gut Bacteria

This is not polite dinner conversation.

However, it is fascinating information and could be very important to understanding and possibly even preventing asthma in young children.

This article outlines some new research out of UBC that found “children gain protection against asthma if exposed to four types of gut bacteria by the age of three months, as their immune system is being established.” When they chose to be scientists, the people on this project may not have expected to be analyzing fecal samples with all the power of modern science, but this ongoing research may pave the way for prevention of asthma in the future.

One big takeaway from the article is that babies don’t necessarily benefit from our germophobic culture of sterilizing everything. From the article:

Finlay said they aren’t counselling people to shovel nasty things into the mouths of babes. But there are asthma studies suggesting if you drop a soother on the floor, for instance, it’s better for the mother to put it into her own mouth and then back in the baby’s mouth rather than wash it off.

“Let them crawl on the floor. Let them lick the floor. If you watch a kid in action they’re basically hoovering everything they can into their mouth. Maybe there’s a reason for that. Maybe they’re trying to colonize themselves early in life.”

This may or may not be good news for your housekeeping routine, but I think there are huge implications for the widespread use of antibiotics in labour and immediately following birth, not to mention how widely antibiotics are prescribed in early childhood.

I found an article from 2012 about research that linked asthma to antibiotics in young children. It says, “The researchers theorize that infancy and childhood are periods in which humans develop a healthy immune system. If this process is disturbed and healthy bacteria are disturbed in the intestinal tract, the immune system may not work as efficiently, opening the door to diseases like asthma.”

Hopefully this connection between gut bacteria and asthma can be more fully understood for the benefit of future generations. It would be lovely to have a world without asthma!