快猫短视频

Some babies born by Caesarean section in Finland are being given tiny doses of their mothers鈥� faeces in an attempt to improve their gut bacteria.

The team running the study has warned women not to copy the idea on their own, as there can be dangerous microbes in faeces. The doctors conducting the work tested for these microbes, ruling out a third of the mothers from the trial after this screening.

鈥淭his is not something to do yourself at home,鈥� says Willem de Vos at the University of Helsinki, Finland. 鈥淭here may be pathogens in the mother鈥檚 microbiome.鈥�

As knowledge of the bacteria in our gut has grown, there has been increasing interest in trying to change which species are present. Some studies have shown that babies born by C-sections have different gut bacteria than those born vaginally, perhaps because they aren鈥檛 as exposed to their mothers鈥� microbes while they are born. It has been proposed that this is why such children have slightly higher rates of conditions such as allergies, asthma and obesity.

Some groups have tried to mimic vaginal birth by wiping the mouths of babies born by C-sections with their mother鈥檚 vaginal fluid. While this did make their gut bacteria more like those of vaginally born babies, it didn鈥檛 make them identical. That may be because it is their mothers鈥� faecal bacteria that usually colonises the gut as women often defecate while in labour, and people delivering babies in the past would commonly have had faecal bacteria on their hands, says de Vos.

His team recruited 17 women who needed a C-section for medical reasons. Three weeks before听the operation, they each gave a stool sample, which was tested for a range of harmful microbes before being frozen. Ten women were ruled out from the study, six of whom because there were signs of harmful microbes in the samples, such as group B streptococci bacteria.

For the rest, a few milligrams of their faeces was mixed with some drops of their breast milk and given to the babies听in their first feed. After three months, these infants鈥� gut bacteria were more similar to those of babies born vaginally than those who didn鈥檛 have this intervention, according to data from other studies. The team is now conducting a placebo-controlled trial with forty babies.

In a larger ongoing , babies听are brushed with a gauze that has had contact with a swab put into the mother鈥檚 anus.

Some researchers say administering faecal bacteria carries risks. 鈥淣o matter how well you screen for harmful bacteria, you are limited in what you can detect,鈥� says Peter Brocklehurst at the University of Birmingham in the UK.

There have also been questions over the original idea behind the intervention. C-section babies may have different gut bacteria not because of how they were born, but due to the reasons the mother needed the surgery in the first place, says Kjersti Aagaard at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. 鈥淲e seem awfully ready to label women who have caesareans as endangering their babies, but we have no evidence that鈥檚 true.鈥�

鈥淧eople have jumped on the bandwagon that the microbiome is the mechanism 鈥� that鈥檚 still far from proven鈥� says Brocklehurst. 鈥淯ntil it鈥檚 proven, why would you try to manipulate that? You could do more harm than good.鈥�

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