Welcome to the program. I’m your host Neal Howard here on Health Professional Radio. Now if you’re a parent of a new board, you’re gonna want to know what 9 out of 10 babies just happen to be missing. It turns out that they’re missing some very important good bacteria, this bacteria kind of sets them up for a healthy immune system.
There’s a new study out that shows how to fill this vital gap. Joining us to explain the study’s results is Dr. Mark Underwood, Chief Neonatologist at UC Davis. Welcome to the program, Dr. Underwood. Thank you very much. A bit of background about yourself. Chief Neonatologist, how did you get into this field?
Well I started off as a general pediatrician for 12 years and then I was just drawn to care of premature infants and the sickest babies in the newborn intensive care unit so then I did some more training in neonatology and I’ve been on the faculty here at UC Davis which is in Sacramento, California now for over the last 13 years or so.
This good bacteria that so many babies are missing, what is this good bacteria? Well all bacteria have these long names, this one’s called ‘Bifidobacterium’ and the species name is ‘Infantis’. So the full name would be ‘Bifidobacterium infantis’.
And what we’ve noticed by looking back at studies over the last hundred years or so ago is that a hundred years ago, a healthy term breastfed infants in the United States were dominated by this particular kind of bacterium and over time particularly in developed countries, the numbers of this particular kind of healthy bacterium has decreased.
In many developing countries where we’ve looked, there’s still a lot of this particular kind of healthy bacteria. In fact in one study we saw that the healthiest babies with the best growth had the highest numbers of this kind of bacteria in their intestinal tract, that was in Bangladesh.
Why is something so beneficial not being consumed by people in developed countries? Why is it something that’s more prevalent in underdeveloped countries? Yes. I don’t know that I have the full answer but the following all seem to be important components.
Changes in our hygiene practices are probably contributing to that. Increasing use of antibiotics, increased use over the last particularly 50 years of formula-feeding as opposed to breastfeeding and the increased numbers of cesarean deliveries. All of those I think are making an impact on the decreasing numbers of these healthy bacteria in babies in developed countries.
I think particularly, the concerning part is this maybe intergenerational, in other words it may be that today’s moms just don’t have very many of these good bacteria themselves to pass on to their babies. Well, can’t we produce it and put it into products like say the bacteria that’s found in yogurt?
Yes. I think that’s really the cool question. So this study that we just finished here at UC Davis just came out last week is a very cool study where we randomly assigned healthy term breastfed babies to either get this probiotic that contains the Bifidobacterium infantis or no probiotics.
Now the idea of giving probiotics to children and adults and even babies is not new, people have been studying this for a long time. The part that’s really exciting and different about this study is that first of all, we chose a probiotic this Bifidobacterium infantis that we know has particularly healthy properties in terms of helping with decreasing inflammation in the gut and those kind of things.
We also chose this bacteria because it’s particularly good at consuming the components of human milk. Now what was different about this study is we only gave these babies the probiotic for 21 days, they started on day of life 7, they stopped on day of life 28 and then we continued to follow them after they stopped the probiotic to see what would happen.
Previous probiotic studies what you see is you give a probiotic for awhile and you can see maybe some benefit while you’re giving it but as soon as you stop the probiotic, the community of bacteria go right back to where they were. In this case, that was very different.
These babies got the probiotic for 3 weeks and then even weeks and months after we stopped the probiotic, we could still find large numbers of these healthy bacteria in the intestines of these little babies for as long as their moms continued to breastfeed.
So it was like we were giving them an initial dose of healthy bacteria and then helping these bacteria to thrive and out-compete the other bacteria by giving them a food source that they’re uniquely designed to consume and that’s human milk.
So was there any comparable benefit with formula or was the study done completely with human milk or was there any animal milk involved to see what the results would be? Yes. With this study, these were all babies who are getting their mom’s milk but your questions an important one.
So the idea of could we provide the same benefits to those babies who need to receive formula? And that’s a cool question that we’d like to look at in the future studies. I think one of the promising developments that’s coming along is we’ve isolated what components of moms milk are stimulating good bacteria to grow.
And so now formula companies are looking at can they add those kinds of human milk components into the formula to help shape the composition of the bacteria and the babies cut in a positive fashion. Other than the obvious benefits of a healthy gut in an infant, are there things that we’re seeing in some of these underdeveloped countries as these children grow into early adulthood and into adulthood that we’re not seeing in developed countries?
Yes. I think we do have some good information there. So in developed countries like the U.S. and Western Europe, what we’re seeing over the last 50 years is a rapid increase in several diseases that seem to be associated with changes in the intestinal bacteria.
So if a baby or a young child has more unhealthy bacteria in their gut, they seem to be at higher risk for things like obesity, and allergies, and eczema and even diabetes, those diseases are uncommon in developing countries but when you watch countries that sort of as they advance economically, they start to see rises in those same diseases.
And so I think the take-home message here is that the advances that we’ve seen in hygiene and in clinical care like with antibiotics and cesarean section deliveries, while they’re life-saving and very essential, they have a downside and and the hopeful thing from this study is that maybe we can impact that downside by shaping the microbiota in babies who are at risk and that would be babies in developed countries to kind of protect them from those diseases that are associated with the intestinal microbiota.
Where can the parents or prospective parents in our audience go and learn more about the results of the study and help to keep their babies healthy in addition to other healthcare providers learning some more as well? Well there’s a link to the study at the website it’s evolvebiosystems.com.
So that would be a good place for families to start and certainly to discuss things with their healthcare provider would be a great idea. Dr. Mark underwood, thank you so much for joining us here on the program. It’s my pleasure, nice to talk with you. You’ve been listening to Health Professional Radio.
I’m your host Neal Howard in studio with Dr. Mark Underwood, Professor of Pediatrics, Chief Division of Neonatology at UC Davis School of Medicine. Transcripts and audio of the program are available at healthprofessionalradio.com.au and also at hpr.fm. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, listen in and download at SoundCloud and be sure and visit our affiliates page at hpr.fm.
