Doctoral Dissertation Research: Impacts of maternal environment on milk immunofactors and infant immune system development

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

In addition to being an infant's first food, human breast milk is medicine. Molecules in milk can protect infants from infectious illness. Recent technological advances now allow scientists to fully explore the wide range of molecules contained in mother's milk. To better understand the sources of variation in the immune protection provided by breast milk, this project will investigate how the mother's current and childhood environments impact the composition of key immune molecules in her milk. This research will also explore how the variation of these milk molecules might influence infant immune system development and consider how the immune system has changed during human evolution. This research has direct benefits to society, including informing parent's infant-feeding decisions, donor milk bank policies, and infant formula composition. This work will also create opportunities for training women and under-represented groups in science through established programs in the US and Poland. Monthly milk samples will be collected from mothers at the Mogielica Human Ecology Study Site in Poland. This study location encompasses villages with varying levels of participation in traditional agriculture and a cash economy, leading to a unique diversity of environments in a small geographic area. The milk samples will be analyzed in the United States using mass spectrometry for selected immune molecules. Milk composition will then be compared to detailed health history interviews to determine what aspects of the maternal environment most influence levels of immune factors in the milk. To explore consequences of variation in milk composition for the infant, milk composition will be compared to salivary measures of the infant's immune function. This study is unique in its longitudinal design, which will allow the researchers to contextualize variation in milk composition and infant immune function in relation to the environment. This study will make a substantial contribution to the existing biological anthropology literature by expanding our knowledge of how immune factors secreted in milk relate to childhood and current exposures in the maternal environment. These findings not only have public health implications but are important for understanding physiological adaptations to human evolutionary transitions.