The Intestinal Microbiome in Early Life: Health and Disease

By M. Arrieta, Leah T. Stiemsma, Nelly Amenyogbe, Eric Michael Brown, B. B. Finlay. Frontiers in Immunology, 2014

924 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Human microbial colonization begins at birth and continues to develop and modulate in species abundance for about 3 years, until the microbiota becomes adult-like. During the same time period, children experience significant developmental changes that influence their health status as well as their immune system. An ever-expanding number of articles associate several diseases with early-life imbalances of the gut microbiota, also referred to as gut microbial dysbiosis. Whether early-life dysbiosis precedes and plays a role in disease pathogenesis, or simply originates from the disease process itself is a question that is beginning to be answered in a few diseases, including IBD, obesity, and asthma. This review describes the gut microbiome structure and function during the formative first years of life, as well as the environmental factors that determine its composition. It also aims to discuss the recent advances in understanding the role of the early-life gut microbiota in the development of immune-mediated, metabolic, and neurological diseases. A greater understanding of how the early-life gut microbiota impacts our immune development could potentially lead to novel microbial-derived therapies that target disease prevention at an early age.

Subfields: Gastroenterology, Genetics, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ae3201260dfff635fb884fcb920e299bff461e44

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Citations in the corpus

Natural history of the infant gut microbiome and impact of antibiotic treatments on strain-level diversity and stability (2015, background): “(36) [reviewed in (37)] have reported that the Bacteroides genus is absent before the introduction of solid food.”
Homeostatic immunity and the microbiota (2017, positive): “…and the microbiota have been recently shown to have profound and long-term implications for the development of inflammatory diseases (reviewed in (Arrieta et al., 2014)) While the vast majority of host/microbe encounters are those resulting from the symbiotic relationship with the microbiota,…”
Microglia development follows a stepwise program to regulate brain homeostasis (2016, background): “S8, A to C; and tables S8 and S10), which may be explained by the change in microbiome composition at weaning (63, 64).”
The First Microbial Colonizers of the Human Gut: Composition, Activities, and Health Implications of the Infant Gut Microbiota (2017, background): “Thus, it is likely that the basis for a healthy microbiota throughout life is set up during its initial development, with the establishment and development of the microbiota being critical for the maturation of the host and long-term well-being (123, 260, 279).”
Stress & the gut-brain axis: Regulation by the microbiome (2017, background): “Nevertheless, GF mice provide a platform onwhich to explore the role of bacteria on early host development and function (Nguyen et al., 2015; Al-Asmakh and Zadjali, 2015; Faith et al., 2010; Arrieta et al., 2014).”