Wu Yuhong, Chen Bihua, Wu Huan, Gao Jinyan, Meng Xuanyi, Chen Hongbing
State Key Laboratory of Food Science and Resources, Nanchang University, Nanchang, China.
College of Food Science and Technology, Nanchang University, Nanchang, China.
Immunology. 2025 Jan;174(1):1-16. doi: 10.1111/imm.13864. Epub 2024 Sep 30.
What infants eat early in life may shape the immune system and have long-standing consequences on the health of the host during later life. In the early months post-birth, breast milk serves as the exclusive and optimal nourishment for infants, facilitating crucial molecular exchanges between mother and infant. Recent advances have uncovered that some maternal factors influence breastfed infant outcomes, including the risk of food allergy (FA). To date, accumulated data show that breastfed infants have a lower risk of FA. However, the issue remains disputed, some reported preventive allergy effects, while others did not confirm such effects, or if identified, protective effects were limited to early childhood. The disputed outcomes may be attributed to the maternal status, as it determines the compounds of the breast milk that breastfed infants are exposed to. In this review, we first detail the compounds in breast milk and their roles in infant FA. Then, we present maternal factors resulting in alterations in breast milk compounds, such as maternal health status, maternal diet intake, and maternal food allergen intake, which subsequently impact FA in breastfed infants. Finally, we analyze how these compounds in breast milk alleviated the infant FA by mother-to-infant transmission. Altogether, the mechanisms are primarily linked to the synergetic and direct effects of compounds in breast milk, via promoting the colonization of gut microbiota and the development of the immune system in infants.
婴儿早期的饮食可能会塑造其免疫系统，并对宿主成年后的健康产生长期影响。在出生后的最初几个月里，母乳是婴儿唯一的最佳营养来源，促进了母婴之间关键的分子交换。最近的研究进展发现，一些母体因素会影响母乳喂养婴儿的结局，包括食物过敏（FA）的风险。迄今为止，积累的数据表明，母乳喂养的婴儿患FA的风险较低。然而，这个问题仍然存在争议，一些研究报告了预防过敏的效果，而另一些研究则未证实这种效果，或者即使发现了保护作用，也仅限于幼儿期。有争议的结果可能归因于母体状态，因为它决定了母乳喂养婴儿所接触的母乳成分。在这篇综述中，我们首先详细介绍母乳中的成分及其在婴儿FA中的作用。然后，我们介绍导致母乳成分改变的母体因素，如母体健康状况、母体饮食摄入和母体食物过敏原摄入，这些因素随后会影响母乳喂养婴儿的FA。最后，我们分析母乳中的这些成分如何通过母婴传播减轻婴儿的FA。总的来说，这些机制主要与母乳中成分的协同和直接作用有关，通过促进婴儿肠道微生物群的定殖和免疫系统的发育。
