Maternal influences on infant gut microbiome and health - Nature

Doctors' prescribing habits are heavily influenced by payments, gifts, and free meals from pharmaceutical companies, leading to more expensive, less appropriate and more drugs being prescribed, a new Cochrane review finds. This can seriously harm both individual patients and health systems. Pharmaceutical companies use a variety of strategies to market and promote their drugs. This can include one-on-one visits by sales reps to doctors' offices and hospitals, gifts and payments including for example paid meals, travel costs to conferences, entertainment, consulting fees, honoraria for participation in advisory boards, and advertising.

Boston, MA—Infants born to mothers who ate a healthy, Mediterranean-style diet during pregnancy were at lower risk for colic and eczema, according to a new study by researchers at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston Children’s Hospital, and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute. The researchers also found that regularly consuming seafood during pregnancy helped lower an infant’s risk for these conditions. “Our own prior studies have shown that babies who had colic have higher rates of atopic conditions in later life, including asthma, seasonal rhinitis and food allergies,” said corresponding author Jenifer Lightdale, associate chief of the Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition at Boston Children’s Hospital and professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. “Our new study is the first to ask how prenatal diet may influence colic, and in particular the combination of colic and eczema, as babies who have both conditions in infancy may be at highest risk for various manifestations of allergies when they are older.”

IntroductionComposition of the healthy eye microbiomeDysbiosis and ocular diseaseEmerging diagnostic and therapeutic opportunitiesFuture directionsReferences The eye's surface hosts a low-abundance microbial community, while the possible existence of a resident microbiome inside the eye remains under investigation.