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Updated: Jun 29, 2025

Author Spotlight: Studying the Impact of Maternal Dietary Deficiencies on Long-Term Offspring Health Outcomes
Published on: June 28, 2024
Postpartum Maternal Anxiety Affects the Development of Food Allergy Through Dietary and Gut Microbial Diversity
Hyunbin Cho1, Jiwon Kim2, Sukyung Kim3
1Department of Digital Health, Samsung Advanced Institute for Health Sciences and Technology (SAIHST), Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Korea.
Purpose:
We aimed to investigate the mediating factors between maternal anxiety and the development of food allergy (FA) in children until 2 years from birth.
Methods:
In this longitudinal cohort of 122 mother-child dyads from pregnancy to 24 months of age, we regularly surveyed maternal psychological states, infant feeding data, and allergic symptoms and collected stool samples at 6 months of age for microbiome analysis. Considering the temporal order of data collection, we investigated serial mediating effects and indirect effects among maternal anxiety, dietary diversity (DD), gut microbial diversity, and FA using structural equation modeling.
Results:
Among the 122 infants, 15 (12.3%) were diagnosed with FA. Increased maternal anxiety between 3 and 6 months after delivery was associated with a lower DD score. Infants with low DD at 4 months showed low gut microbial richness, which was associated with FA development. When the infants were grouped into 4 subtypes, using consensus clustering of 13 gut bacteria significantly associated with maternal anxiety and DD, Prevotella, Eubacterium, Clostridiales and Lachnospiraceae were more abundant in the group with lower FA occurrence.
Conclusions:
Postpartum maternal anxiety, mediated by reduced DD and gut microbial diversity, may be a risk factor for the development of FA in infants during the first 2 years of life.
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