Role of the gut microbiota in maternal resilience and infant development during the COVID-19 pandemic

• In Event: The biological signatures of exposure to COVID-19 lockdown during the first 1000 days of life.

Abstract

Background: One of the unintended consequences of the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been a ‘shadow pandemic’ of mental health problems with potentially enduring consequences. Emerging evidence suggests that the gut microbiome is an important contributor to both stress resilience and mental health outcomes, suggesting the possibility of increasing stress resilience and improving mental health via the gut microbiome. Resilience to psychological stress is especially important during pregnancy because of their important for healthy infant development.
The primary aim of this study was to identify gut microbiome targets that were associated with stress resilience in pregnant individuals, and associations with infant developmental milestones
Methods: Pregnant individuals were recruited during the COVID-19 pandemic as part of a large Canadian study (n = 11,000). Women were invited to provide a stool sample if they were in their 3rd trimester of pregnancy, had not received antibiotics in the last month, and had no previous diagnosis of an anxiety or depression disorder. Stool samples (n=504) were assayed using whole-genome shotgun sequencing to assess alpha diversity, the relative abundance of bacterial taxa (n=249 were available for the preliminary analyses, but all data will be available for the presentation). During pregnancy, participants reported exposure to objective hardship because of the pandemic (e.g., job loss, social isolation, and disrupted access to health care), anxiety (PROMIS Anxiety) and depression (EPDS) symptoms, and psychological resilience (CD-RISC 2). We identified resilient individuals as those who had high objective hardship but were below the clinical cut off on both anxiety and depression measures. Stress susceptible individuals had high objective hardship exposure and were above the clinical cut off for anxiety and/or depression. At one year of infant age, parents reported on developmental milestones using the Ages and Stages Questionnaire – 3.
Results: Our preliminary data analyses (Figure 1) indicate that stress resilient individuals had higher Shannon alpha diversity (mean difference = 0.11, p < 0.05, 95% CI: [0.0006; 0.2170]) compared to stress susceptible individuals. There were 9 bacterial taxa of which the relative abundances were different between groups. Of the differentially abundant taxa, Bacteroides cellulosilyticus also positively correlated with CD-RISC 2 scores (r = 0.16, 95% CI 0.029, 0.286). CD-RISC 2 scores were also associated with decreased odds for developmental delay among infants in the Communication (OR = 0.72), Fine Motor (OR = 0.77), and Personal-Social domains (OR=0.78). There was a trend to lower abundance of B. cellulosilyticus among infants at risk for developmental delay in the Communication domain (U = 1571, p = 0.07).
Discussion: These preliminary data suggest that the composition and metabolic function of the gut microbiota differ in some ways between resilient and stress susceptible pregnant individuals. The benefits of increased resilience were also observed for infants in 3 of the 5 domains assessed by the ASQ-3. Not much is known about B. cellulosilyticus, however this taxon may be linked to increased dietary fibre (e.g., cereal grains) intake in human, suggesting a potential role of diet in our resilient group.

Authors

• Marcel van de Wouw, University of Calgary

• Catherine Lebel, University of Calgary, AB

• Lianne M Tomfohr-Madsen, The University of Calgary

• Gerald Giesbrecht, University of Calgary (U of C)
  Presenting Author