Karen Janigan is a senior marketing and communications officer at the Foundation
They may be as unique as fingerprints, but they are the last thing you’d expect to be catalogued. Or to generate as much as excitement as was shared by one of the IWK Health Centre’s newest researchers: Dr. Gamal Mahdi a pediatric gastroenterologist who comes to us from the Royal Aberdeen Children’s Hospital.
Yup, a gastroenterologist. So we know he’s talking about things not often discussed at the dinner table, but that have become the subject of 10-foot billboards: so nicely termed ‘digestive health.’
“The fetal gut is sterile,” Mahdi explains during a short presentation on his research passion. “We start to acquire bacteria from the time of delivery. Babies delivered by C-section have slightly different ones than babies who have travelled through the birth canal. Bottle fed babies are different than breast fed.”
Referred to as microbiota or gut flora, Dr. Mahdi says that it takes about a year before the relative levels of different bacteria in our digestive tract stabilizes – forming a signature stew unique to you.
“And it is stable for the rest of your life,” he adds, apart from diseases or environmental influences like taking antibiotics that can upset the balance and allow the inflammatory bacteria to gain the upper hand and cause temporary diarrhea.
Dr. Mahdi explains that advances in genetic sequencing means researchers know more about the bacteria in our guts than ever before and can more accurately study the bacterial link to recent trends, diseases and syndromes that plague humans.
And the appetite is certainly there for this kind of knowledge given the whole marketing campaign about whether gut health can be improved by eating yoghurt (the numbers are too small, suggests Dr. Mahdi) or whether there is a relationship between our overall lack of exposure to all bacteria, the decline of infectious diseases, and the increase in immunological and allergic diseases doctors are seeing.
With the highest rate of inflammatory bowel disease in the world, we’re lucky that Dr. Mahdi fell in love with Halifax when he came for a visit. Call it a gut instinct!
