Background: Recent studies have shown a diverse microbiome in the first stool after birth. The clinical significance of the microbiome of the first stool is not known. Infantile colic has earlier been associated with the composition of the intestinal microbiome.
Methods: We set out to test whether the microbiome of the first stool is associated with subsequent infantile colic in a prospective, population-based cohort study of 212 consecutive newborn infants. We used next-generation sequencing of the bacterial 16S rRNA gene.
Results: The newborns who later developed infantile colic (n = 19) had a lower relative abundance of the genus Lactobacillus and the phylum Firmicutes in the first stool than those who remained healthy (n = 139). By using all microbiome data, random forest algorithm classified newborn with subsequent colic and those who remained healthy with area under the curve of 0.66 (SD 0.03) as compared to that of shuffled samples (P value <0.001).
Conclusions: In this prospective, population-based study, the microbiome of the first-pass meconium was associated with subsequent infantile colic. Our results suggest that the pathogenesis of infantile colic is closely related to the intestinal microbiome at birth.