Source: AllerGen NCE
New research from the CHILD Cohort Study involving more than 1,500 infants has shed light on the gut bacterium Clostridioides difficile and its association with the type of feeding in early life.
The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Immunology, found that 31% of the infants analyzed carried Clostridioides difficile (C. difficile) in their gut and that the colonization rate was lowest among babies who were exclusively breastfed.
“Some infants carry the diarrhea-causing bacterium C. difficile in their guts without any symptoms. However, when the levels of gut bacteria become imbalanced, this particular bacterium can multiply, causing illness and increasing the susceptibility to chronic disease later in childhood,” said senior author Dr. Anita Kozyrskyj.
The researchers further found that breastfed infants colonized with C. difficile appeared to possess a gut microbiome that differs in other ways from that of non-colonized breastfed infants and resembles that of formula-fed infants.
“This finding is of interest because although it was less common for breastfed infants to be C. difficile carriers, those that were colonized had fewer beneficial microbes such as Bifidobacteria and immune proteins like secretory IgA,” said first author Kelsea Drall, an M.Sc. graduate from the University of Alberta and an AllerGen trainee.