מתוך medicontext.co.il
By Kristin Demos
STOCKHOLM (Reuters Health) – An anthroposophic lifestyle, including birth at home, may affect the intestinal microflora in infancy and lead to less childhood allergies, according to a new Swedish study.
People who follow a lifestyle based on the anthroposophy concepts of the late Rudolph Steiner of Austria, restrict the use of antibiotics, have few vaccinations, and eat more fermented vegetables containing live lactobacilli.
In an earlier related study published in The Lancet, Dr. Johan Alm with Stockholm's Sצder Hospital's Sachsska Children's Clinic and his colleagues found that the prevalence of allergies in children aged 5-13 from anthroposophic families is half that in same-aged children from "traditional" families who lived in neighboring communities, in line with the hygiene hypothesis.
However, the researchers could not point out which particular lifestyle factors might explain the effect. "We then wanted to establish if intestinal flora in early infancy is of importance in the development of the immune system," Dr. Alm said.
In a cross-sectional study, Dr. Alm compared the intestinal microflora in infants less than 2 years old–69 from an anthroposophic household and 59 from a traditional home.
The intestinal flora differed. Infants who had received antibiotics had fewer enterococci and lactic acid bacteria compared to children with no antibiotic exposure.
"Intestinal flora has its own ecological system and we don't know if these two bacteria are of importance, but we do know they are definite markers of a changed environment in the intestinal flora," Dr. Alm told Reuters Health explained.
Furthermore, Alm found that children born at home had more diverse lactobacilli than children born in a hospital. Twenty percent of the anthroposophic children included in the study were born at home, while the control group infants were born in a hospital or clinic.
"We think that having more diverse lactobacilli could be better than having just certain strains," Dr. Alm said. "This high turnover rate could be beneficial for the education of the immune system of an infant."
Dr. Alm's study will be published this winter in Pediatric Allergy and Immunology.
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