Association of Maternal Obesity with Infant Gut Microbiota: Evidence from Cebu, Philippines

Abstract

Objective: The objective of this study was to investigate the correlation between maternal obesity and infant gut microbiota. It was designed to test the hypothesis that infants born from obese mothers have different gut microbiotas than those born from non-obese mothers, which may impact the health of the infant during later stages of their life.Methods: The study was conducted on a cohort of Filipino women and their newborn children taking part in the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey (CLHNS). Fecal samples from pregnant and non-pregnant index children of the cohort were collected from November 2017 through February 2020, resulting in a total of 106 distinct samples. When these pregnant women gave birth, infant fecal samples were taken both at two weeks of age and six months of age for a total of 93 samples. DNA was extracted from ethanol-preserved fecal samples and a two-step PCR was used to amplify the V4 region of the 16S rRNA gene in order to generate amplicon data describing microbial communities. Sequence data were quality-filtered and denoised using the bioinformatic platform QIIME2, and the resulting data were analyzed using the statistical programming software R with the goal of associating infant gut microbiota with maternal obesity.Results: PERMANOVA tests comparing infant microbiome composition across maternal BMI groups (i.e. underweight, normal, overweight/obese) were not statistically significant (p=.28), and the association only slightly increases when controlling for geography (p=.25). ANOVA tests revealed no statistically significant differences in infant gut microbiota diversity between the maternal BMI groups (F2 = 0.778). While these findings do not support a largescale effect of maternal BMI on the infant gut microbiome, a few individual taxa were affected by overweight/obese and underweight maternal BMI status.Conclusion: The effect of maternal BMI on the infant gut microbiome does not appear to be substantial in this sample of Filipino mothers and infants. While some individual taxa do appear to be impacted by maternal BMI status, the mechanisms through which this occurs remains unclear.

Files

Additional details