Breast milk from healthy women has higher anti- Candida properties than women with vaginal infections during pregnancy

Azka Ainun Nisaa; Chern-Ein Oon; Sasidharan Sreenivasan; Venugopal Balakrishnan; Jun Jie Tan; Cindy Shuan-Ju Teh; Salina Sany; Svetoslav Dimitrov Todorov; Guoxia Liu; Yong-Ha Park; Min-Tze Liong

doi:10.1007/s10068-022-01088-x

Breast milk from healthy women has higher anti- Candida properties than women with vaginal infections during pregnancy

Food Sci Biotechnol. 2022 May 22;32(4):471-480. doi: 10.1007/s10068-022-01088-x. eCollection 2023 Mar.

Affiliations

¹ School of Industrial Technology, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 11800 Penang, Malaysia.
² Institute for Research in Molecular Medicine (INFORMM), Universiti Sains Malaysia, 11800 Penang, Malaysia.
³ Advanced Medical and Dental Institute, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 13200 Penang, Malaysia.
⁴ Department of Medical Microbiology, Faculty of Medicine, Universiti Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
⁵ ProBacLab, Department of Advanced Convergence, Handong Global University, Pohang, Gyeongbuk 37554 Republic of Korea.
⁶ Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100101 People's Republic of China.
⁷ Jeonbuk Institute for Food-Bioindustry, Probionic Corporation, 111-18, Wonjangdong-gil, Deokjin-gu, Jeonju-si, 54810 Jeollabuk-do South Korea.

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate the different immunological and antimicrobial properties of breast milk from women with (W) or without (WO) vaginal yeast infections during pregnancy in 85 lactating women (W, n = 43; WO, n = 42). Concentrations of IL-10, IgA, IgM, IgG, EGF, and TGF-α were similar in both groups. However, breast milk of women aged below 31 years old from the W-group showed higher concentration of EGF than the WO-group (p = 0.031). Breast milk from WO-group exhibited higher anti-Candida properties than W-group, both via growth inhibition and aggregation of yeast cells (p < 0.001). Correlation analysis showed that breast milk concentration of TGF-α positively correlated with concentrations of IL-10 (p = 0.001) and IgA (p = 0.021) in the W-group. Data from our present study shows that although breast milk from women with vaginal infections during pregnancy may not sufficiently hinder Candida growth, other immuno-modulatory bioactives may substitute for such a protective effect.

Keywords: Anti-Candida; Breast milk; Immuno-modulation; Pregnant women; Vaginal infections.