The human microbiome plays a key role of in orchestrating the long-term health of an individual, including growth and metabolism, immune development and infection resistance. Early life nutrition has a strong impact in the shaping the gut microbiome. The microbial communities that reside in the human gut are constantly exposed to environmental perturbations. Throughout human evolution, the gut microbiota has been exposed to nutrient intake from diverse energy sources and constant exposure to new bacteria, fungi, protozoa and viruses. In the past decades, societal and cultural changes resulted in increased exposure to antibiotics, food preservatives and sanitation and hygiene products that may perturbate the microbial ecology of the gut in an unprecedented way. In particular, the use of antibiotics substantially affects the microbiota.

This study aims to prospectively determine mechanistic links between early life antibiotic exposure and disruption of the infant gut microbiome development and to determine whether synbiotic supplemented formula could secure early life microbiome development, by improving individual microbiota resilience.

Current lack of data on improving resilience and possible restoration of the gut microbiota in toddlers after antibiotics by synbiotics leads to the aim of this study; to investigate the effect of a young child formula with synbiotics, a combination of prebiotic fibers with a probiotic Bifidobacterium species, on individual gut microbiota resilience. “Resilience” is the ability of a community to return to its baseline structure following a perturbation.

In the gut in toddlers at the beginning and after receiving broad spectrum antibiotic treatment compared to standard treatment treatment. Moreover, total microbiota composition, faecal parameters, quality of life, stool characteristics and gastrointestinal symptoms and anthropometrics will be evaluated. The scientific and technical knowledge generated in this project will allow manufacturers of young child formula to develop next-generation health-promoting products focused on improving microbiota resilience with a significantly shorter time-to-market.

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