Malnutrition has a damaging effect on the presence of friendly bacterial communities in the guts of malnourished children, according to a research article published recently in the prestigious journal Nature, reports UNB.
The Nature article, titled 'Persistent Gut Microbiota Immaturity in Malnourished Bangladeshi Children,' revealed that childhood malnutrition has a damaging effect on gut health that does not completely recover after nutritional intervention.
Co-author of the paper and director of Centre for Nutrition and Food Security (CNFS) Dr Tahmeed Ahmed said, "This research has contributed immensely to what we know about the mechanisms operating in acute malnutrition. I believe it will open up new vistas for simplifying treatment of this dreadful condition that affects millions of children globally."
The article was based on a study that was conducted by a collaboration between icddr,b, the Centre for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology at Washington University; Department of Anthropology, New School for Social Research in New York; and the Departments of Medicine, Microbiology and Pathology, University of Virginia School of Medicine on this project with financial support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; the International Atomic Energy Agency; and the National Institutes of Health.
The icddr,b team also included scientists Dr Sayeeda Huq, Dr Md Rashidul Haque, Dr Mustafa Mahfuz and Mohammed A Alam.
The study was carried out on the children who got admitted in the Nutrition Rehabilitation Unit or enrolled in the ongoing MAL-ED project located at Mirpur in Dhaka.
The study compared malnourished children up to two years of age with healthy children coming from similar socioeconomic background and helped to explain why therapeutic food interventions for malnutrition do not always result in long-term restoration of growth in children.
The authors of the article expressed the hope that the study would help explain why millions of malnourished children suffer from stunted growth and fail to thrive even after treatment with nutrient-rich therapeutic foods.
They said certain microbes present in the human gut are essential for extracting and metabolising nutrients from foods.
