The practice may be linked to healthier infant development, but safety and efficacy concerns still remain.
To restore the microbiomes of infants delivered by C-section, researchers have come up with a simple solution: Swab them with bacteria from their mother’s vagina shortly after they are born.
When the babies reached 3 months and 6 months old, their parents reported via questionnaire that those who had undergone vaginal seeding were slightly more advanced in their motor and communication skills than those who had not. Wayne Cutfield, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of Auckland who was not involved with the study, cautions that this apparent developmental effect is subtle, and that the scores of both groups fell within the normal range. Additionally, the questionnaire is normally used to assess whether children are below a certain cutoff and developmentally impaired—not to measure typical development milestones.
The study’s sample size also remains too small to make firm conclusions about any benefits associated with vaginal seeding, Money argues. In previous work, she found that a giving a baby its mother’s
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