03 Feb, 2025
Over the past few years, an increase in the prevalence of food sensitization and allergy has been seen.1 The major risk factor for having food allergies and other allergic diseases is the presence of IgE antibodies to specific food antigens.2 Food sensitization develops in early infancy and prevalence increases from 10% to 20% about 6 months of age to 20% to 30% when the child is 5 years old.3 At the RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences a study conducted led by Hiroshi Ohno concluded that one-month-old infant's gut bacteria are associated with food allergies and food sensitivities especially to eggs while some bacteria are not and found factors that can predict the type of bacteria dominating the guts of neonates. The study also concluded that probiotic supplements help prevent food allergies in at-risk infants. The gut microbiome presents immediately after birth and includes bacteria which help in the normal development of the immune system and protect against some diseases as well.
The study took data from two groups of Japanese children from birth to 7 years. One group constituted a high-risk group with 270 children with a positive family history of allergies to food or allergic diseases. The second group comprised 245 children to test for allergy treatments. When the body considers a protein in the food as harmful mistakenly it causes an immune response and attacks the protein leading to food allergies. The immune response is in the form of an antibody called IgE. The research studied milk, peanut, egg white, and wheat-specific IgE levels in blood in children from 1 year to 7 years, and simultaneously gut microbiota analysis was done, and data was collected which started from the first week of birth. By understanding both the results they wanted to identify predictable gut microbiota biomarkers for food sensitization and allergies. They found that at all times over the 7-year period, the gut microbiota which was present at 1 month of age were mostly associated with food specific IgE levels in blood till 7 years of age. The study focused on 3 types of bacteria that were majorly present in the gut of infants and type-3, Bifidobacterium-dominant gut microbiome had significantly less risk of developing food allergies to egg whites than in infants with other bacteria dominating in their gut. And this trend also followed in later life for allergic reactions to egg whites.
To find what determines the kind of bacteria in infants at one month of age they studied 515 children and found that the type of delivery and the feeding habit determined the gut bacteria dominance. Surprisingly infants who were normally delivered but received a little less breastfeeding dominated type-3, Bifidobacterium, the infants with normal delivery and predominant breastfeeding had type 1 microbiota, and infants that were delivered by cesarean section and breastfeeding was low had domination of type-2 microbiota.
So predominant breastfeeding is good for the gut is now a little under question but from this study, it was surely concluded that microbiota are related to food allergen-specific IgE levels, and intervention with probiotics containing Bifidobacterium type-3 during infancy will help prevent food allergies later in life, especially in children who are at high-risk.4
References:
- Ronmark E,Bjerg A, Perzanowski M, Platts-Mills T, Lundback B. Major increase in allergic sensitization in school children from 1996 to 2006 in northern Sweden. J Allergy Clin Immunol 2009;124:357-63,63.el-15.
- Waserman S, Begin P, Watson W. IgE – mediated food allergy. Allergy Asthma Clin Immunol 2018;14:55
- Chiu CY, Huang YL, tsai MH, Tu YL, Hua MC, Yao TC, et al. Sensitization to food and inhalant allergens in relation to atopic diseases in early childhood: a birth cohort study. PLoS One 2014;9:e 102809.
- Ryohei Shibata et al, Neonatal gut microbiota and risk of developing food sensitization and allergy, Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.jaci.2024.10.029