Abstract
The application of metabolomics in neonatology offers an approach to investigate the complex relationship between nutrition and infant health. Characterization of the metabolome of human milk enables an investigation into nutrients that affect the neonatal metabolism and identification of dietary interventions for infants at risk of diseases such as necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC). In this study, we aimed to identify differences in the metabolome of breast milk of 48 mothers with preterm infants with NEC and non-NEC healthy controls. A minimum significant difference was observed in the human milk metabolome between the mothers of infants with NEC and mothers of healthy control infants. However, significant differences in the metabolome related to fatty acid metabolism, oligosaccharides, amino sugars, amino acids, vitamins and oxidative stress-related metabolites were observed when comparing milk from mothers with control infants of ≤1.0 kg birth weight and >1.5 kg birth weight. Understanding the functional biological features of mothers’ milk that may modulate infant health is important in the future of tailored nutrition and care of the preterm newborn.
Highlights
We identified mothers with non-necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) control infants born 1.5 kg birth weight (n = 15), which were not age-matched
As there were minimal significant differences in the milk metabolites from mothers with NEC infants compared with non-NEC controls, we focused on the differences in milk metabolites between mothers with infants with a birth weight of ≤1.0 kg compared with >1.5 kg
We explored the metabolome of human milk samples collected from mothers of infants that developed NEC and healthy controls and further characterized the milk metabolome of mothers with control neonates with birth weight of ≤1.0 kg compared with birth weight >1.5 kg
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Human breast milk metabolomics aims to identify the complete set of low molecular weight metabolites in maternal milk. This is a promising approach for metabolic fingerprinting and phenotyping of maternal milk to highlight variations in composition related to maternal health and diet and the resulting impact on the infant. Variations in the bioactive components of human milk have been shown to influence neonatal health outcomes, including growth, development, protection from disease development, neurodevelopment, and immunological development [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
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