moods in children?
A recent study links gut bacteria levels to a child''s nervous mood. Here are the details
Some websites, including Mail Online, asked a question about "angry mood" and then went on to say that "your child''s gut bacteria is the reason behind his bad behavior." This is based on the results of studies that showed the relationship between the types of bacteria in the stool samples of two-year-old children and their mood changes.
Numerous studies have also paid great attention to the relationship between the prevalence of gut bacteria (known as the gut microbiota) and its impact on health.
Studies have linked gut bacteria to other ailments, including obesity, allergies, and bowel disease, and researchers are now trying to find out whether or not bacteria are the cause of poor moods — such as anxiety and depression.
So the researchers took stool samples from 75 children from Ohio, USA, and their mothers filled out questionnaires about their mood and behavior. The aim was to find out the relationship between aspects of the child''s mood and gut bacteria.
The researchers found that both girls and boys with poorer gut bacteria were more likely to be called "excitability" - a term used to describe the combination of impulsive behavior and hyperactivity. Due to the studies reaching these results, it became impossible to deny the idea of the relationship between bacteria and child behavior. This research, which is in your hands, is an exploratory research, so we will not draw many conclusions from it.
We advise you to change your child''s gut microbiota in order to improve their behavior, you just have to focus on your child''s emotional moments.
Where does the truth of the story come from?
This study was conducted by a group of researchers at Ohio State University in the US and was funded by grants from universities, the National Institutes of Health and the National Center for the Advancement of Science. It has been published in one of the documented medical journals concerned with the brain, behavior and the immune system.
Mail Online ignored the warnings mentioned in the study about the relationship of bacteria to mood or behavioral changes, claiming that the study announced that "the quality of a certain number of bacteria can affect the child''s behavior" and that parents should always "blame the bacteria" in the child''s gut when changing his behavior.
The study was not only concerned with bad behaviors, but also concerned with studying the child''s mood levels, which indicate the extent of hyperactivity in the child.
What type of research is this?
This research is a cross-sectional study aimed at finding out the relationship between the gut microbiota (the number and quantity of bacteria that live in the intestines) and the child''s mood.
CT studies cannot determine which factors come to the fore—that is, they cannot determine whether bacteria appear before a child acquires a behavior or not. In this type of study, they cannot know which factor affects the other.
Moreover, we find that observational studies like this one cannot say for sure that one factor causes the other to occur simply because one appears to be related to the other. But we still need more evidence, through a group of different studies and designs, by scientists so that we can confirm the cause-effect relationship.
What does this research include?
The researchers sent out online questionnaires to 79 of the mothers who volunteered in the study to assess their children''s moods, diet and behavior. The age of these children ranged from 18 to 27 months.
The mothers then collected samples of their children''s stool from the diapers and sent them to the researchers for analysis. The researchers also used a set of statistical models to train and find out whether the abundance of bacteria or the presence of any type of bacteria may affect the child''s mood or not.
Of the 79 children who were tested, only 75 cases were analyzed. In two of them, the researchers were unable to examine the stool sample. In addition, two unclear cases were excluded. The rejection of the cases may be due to questionnaires whose results were outside the expected limits.
The researchers also relied on a number of techniques to search for different types of bacteria and the prevalence of each type of bacteria in the samples, and the number of bacteria present in each stool sample and the percentage of each of them.
The researchers relied on the use of many statistical models to evaluate the relationship between the results of the stool sample and the results of the questionnaire, and concluded that there are three main aspects of mood in children.
The first, called negative affect or negative emotions, includes a range of traits including fear, fussiness, restlessness, shyness, sensitivity to the surrounding environment, and how easily a child is soothed.
The second is called excitability, and it refers to a group of reckless behavior and hyperactivity in the child, how much pleasure the child feels in exciting situations, whether they are social personalities or not, and how excited they are about the pleasure they receive.
As for the third type, it is called effort, and it means the child''s ability to stop and prevent himself from doing an action, to shift his attention from one activity to another, to enjoy familiar activities, and to focus on the main task.
It was shown that the results of the questionnaire are different for girls than for boys, as girls tend more to effort, while boys tend to be excited, and accordingly, the researchers analyzed the results of boys and girls separately.
What were the main results?
As expected, there were differences between boys and girls in several temperamental questionnaires, but despite this, there was not much overall difference between the ages of boys and girls in terms of the number of bacteria present in the intestines.
