Grant: Project Grant

Bacteria and humans co-evolved, and this has resulted in humans becoming dependent on the bacteria that live in their guts. These bacteria provide a broad range of 'services' to humans, including producing nutrients and metabolites that are essential to human life. Infants begin to acquire a gut microbiome at birth, and there is strong animal evidence that lack of exposure to 'healthy' bacteria at the right times in development results in social, behavioral, and emotional problems. But studies that track the co-development of the gut microbiome and children's socioemotional problems have not been done. It is important to do these studies because we need to understand the role that gut bacteria play in order to promote healthy child development. We propose to collect stool samples and measure children's socioemotional development over the first 4 years of life and then examine how the changes in the gut microbiome relate to changes in socioemotional problems. We will also study the effects of exposure to prenatal stress because it can disrupt healthy development in children and because we believe that one way it may do so is through disrupting the early life microbiome. We have already collected stool samples and measures of socioemotional problems at 3-, 12-, and 24-months of age in 552 children. We plan to follow up at 36- and 48-months so that we can examine how changes in the microbiome relate to changes in children's socioemotional problems and learn what role prenatal stress might play in disrupting healthy development. This work is important because children's mental health problems are one of the most costly and debilitating health problems around the globe, and we need to find new ways to prevent the growing tide of mental health problems. By studying the gut microbiome, we believe we will discover new clues to the ways that mental health problems get started in the first few years of life and new intervention targets that we can test in future studies.