A new study leveraging CHILD Study data shows that the family risk for asthma—typically passed from moms to babies—may not be a result of genetics alone: it may also involve the microbes found in a baby’s digestive tract.
CHILD investigator Dr. Anita Kozyrskyj led the research, which found that Caucasian baby boys born to pregnant moms with asthma—the infants with the highest risk for developing asthma in early childhood—are also one-third as likely to have a gut microbiome with specific characteristics at three to four months of age.
These findings provide the first evidence that maternal asthma during pregnancy may be associated with changes in an infant’s gut microbes.
“Our discovery, with more research, could eventually lead to a preventative approach involving modifying the gut microbiome in infants to reduce the risk,” Dr, Kozyrskyj observes.