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 During a vaginal delivery, microbes present in the birth canal
colonize the baby’s skin, mouth and gut, forming their so-called
microbiomes. These maternal bacteria are believed to play many roles
in babies’ health, ranging from aiding digestion and metabolism to
supporting brain development and bolstering the immune system.
“Cesarean delivery, as well as other disruptors of early microbiota
assembly – for example antibiotic use and formula feeding – have
been associated with conditions emerging later in life including
asthma, allergies, type 1 diabetes and obesity,” lead study author
Maria Dominguez Bello of New York University said by email.
To test out whether it might be possible to give C-section babies
some help building their microbiomes despite the circumstances of
their delivery, researchers swaddled four of these infants in gauze
soaked in their mothers’ vaginal fluids.
All of the C-sections were scheduled, making it possible for
researchers to place gauze in the mother’s vagina for an hour before
the surgery and then wrap the infants in the gauze right after
birth.
One month after delivery, researchers collected more than 1,500
samples from the babies’ bodies to see what types of bacteria made
up their microbiomes.
The C-section babies exposed to birth fluids had microbiomes that
were more similar to their vaginally-delivered peers than to
C-section infants who didn’t get this exposure, researchers report
in the journal Nature Medicine.
There are a lot of caveats to the findings beyond just the small
size of the experiment, chief among them that it’s impossible to say
whether swaddling C-section babies in vaginal fluids has any
short-term or long-term health benefits.
In addition, this intervention might carry an infection risk, and
might not work for emergency C-section surgeries that leave no time
to have women soak the gauze before babies arrive, the authors note.
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“If we demonstrate that there is a health benefit, and that is of
course a big `if,’ I think this has the potential to become common
practice in scheduled C-sections,” senior study author Jose Clemente
of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York said by
email. “As with any other intervention, there will be cases where
this procedure will not be advisable and should not be performed.”
The potential is important to explore, however, because C-section
rates are surging in many developed countries despite the fact that
the World Health Organization recommends this surgery for only the
10 percent to 15 percent of births when the health of the mother or
baby is in danger, Dr. Alexander Khoruts of the University of
Minnesota in Minneapolis notes in an accompanying editorial.
Still, research on the role of the gut microbiome in human health is
still in its infancy, Khoruts said by email.
“It is reasonable to wonder how alterations in the gut microbiota
composition can affect human physiology, and whether the changes
caused by antibiotics, altered diet and practices during the
earliest years of life contribute to the rise of many diseases that
seem to be more prevalent in the developed world,” Khoruts added.
“However, these speculations are still mere hypotheses.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1KlFfJp and http://bit.ly/1QCNVuf Nature
Medicine, online February 1, 2016.
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