There’s Something Different About The Gut Microbes of Babies Born at Home
November 4th, 2018Via: ScienceAlert:
Compared to the babies born at home, the findings reveal that hospital-born infants had a lower diversity of gut flora, and this change persisted for the entire month.
“The reasons for the differences between infants born at home versus in hospitals are not known, but we speculate that common hospital interventions like early infant bathing and antibiotic eye prophylaxis or environmental factors – like the aseptic environment of the hospital – may be involved,” says senior author Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello, a researcher in microbiota function at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
These results suggest that babies born in hospitals are immediately exposed to less microbes and, therefore, have less diverse microbiomes in the first month of life.
