Children’s Brains 2021 Review

Children’s health is a constant theme in the research, but parents rarely hear about it until it becomes government policy, or a particularly popular piece gets published in the press. A piece of research in April showed, in a rat model, that drinking sugared beverages in adolescence impairs cognitive performance, learning, and memory in adulthood (see below). Not good. Avoid the sugary drinks.

The mechanism seems to be through altering the gut microbiota — a topic I have and will report on again. There was a lot of research in 2021 on this. One by Seki et al. showed that, quite specifically, an imbalanced gut microbiota in pre-term infants leads to more brain damage – brain damage being a risk for such pre-term infants. Another study from Vienna University found that overgrowth in the gastrointestinal tract with the bacterium Klebsiella is associated with an increased presence of certain immune cells and this can lead to neurological damage in premature babies.

I personally found that surprising, I confess I had not considered the microbiota of pre-term infants as being important. Though I do know that vaginal birth, breast feeding, and playing around in the dirt, all contribute to having a varied microbiota. Another surprising one in 2021 by Carlson et al. is that gut microbiota at 1-month was associated with fear responses at 1-year old.