Microbiota - ways of delivery and later life effects

The way you are born determines how your microbiota develops. A child who is born naturally will have a different microbiota than a child who is born via c-section. A c-section child will have less diverse microbiota, so their guts will contain fewer different microbes. These differences in microbiota related to the mode of birth are present only early in life, but they have potential risks later in life: allergies, asthma, type 1 diabetes and obesity.

Why, would you ask? One hypothesis is that different microbes colonizing the babies' gut have different effects on the immune system development. The window of opportunity to train and develop your immune system health may be different for natural born and c-section born children. Another hypothesis is that mom's gut microbes are already selected and deemed safe, being also beneficial for food digestion, decreasing the risk of exposure to pathogens and increasing the chance of beneficial food degradation in the child's intestine.

The mode of delivery determines which microbes will colonize the gut right after birth, but has no effects of the microbiota existing later in life. All the correlation between mode of delivery and overall health as an adult might be possible because of the differences in the microbiota composition from the newborn's gut.

Next post will be about gestational age of microbiota.

See you soon!
G.