Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2022 Sep 1;25(5):292-297.
doi: 10.1097/MCO.0000000000000860. Epub 2022 Jul 16.

Assessment of human milk in the era of precision health

Farhad Dastmalchi  1 , Ke Xu  1 , Helen N Jones  2   3   4 , Dominick J Lemas  1   3   4
Affiliations
Review

Assessment of human milk in the era of precision health

Farhad Dastmalchi et al. Curr Opin Clin Nutr Metab Care. .

Abstract

Purpose of review: Precision health provides an unprecedented opportunity to improve the assessment of infant nutrition and health outcomes. Breastfeeding is positively associated with infant health outcomes, yet only 58.3% of children born in 2017 were still breastfeeding at 6 months. There is an urgent need to examine the application of precision health tools that support the development of public health interventions focused on improving breastfeeding outcomes.

Recent findings: In this review, we discussed the novel and highly sensitive techniques that can provide a vast amount of omics data and clinical information just by evaluating small volumes of milk samples, such as RNA sequencing, cytometry by time-of-flight, and human milk analyzer for clinical implementation. These advanced techniques can run multiple samples in a short period of time making them ideal for the routine clinical evaluation of milk samples.

Summary: Precision health tools are increasingly used in clinical research studies focused on infant nutrition. The integration of routinely collected multiomics human milk data within the electronic health records has the potential to identify molecular biomarkers associated with infant health outcomes.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Conflicts of interest

All authors report no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Personalized health data sources composition.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Integration of personalized health data has potential advantage to switch from conventional infant feeding into personalized infant feeding that could lead to better early life health outcome.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. A History of Infant Feeding [Internet]. [cited 2022 Mar 9]. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2684040/
    1. Lenehan SM, Boylan GB, Livingstone V, Fogarty L, Twomey DM, Nikolovski J, et al. The impact of short-term predominate breastfeeding on cognitive outcome at 5 years. Acta Paediatrica. 2020;109(5):982–8. - PubMed
    1. Granger CL, Embleton ND, Palmer JM, Lamb CA, Berrington JE, Stewart CJ. Maternal breastmilk, infant gut microbiome and the impact on preterm infant health. Acta Paediatrica. 2021;110(2):450–7. - PubMed
    1. Papastavrou M, Sm G, Komodiki E, Paliatsou S, RMidw, Kontogeorgou A, et al. Breastfeeding in the Course of History. 2015;
    1. Elemental signatures of Australopithecus africanus teeth reveal seasonal dietary stress | Nature [Internet]. [cited 2022 Mar 9]. Available from: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1370-5 - PMC - PubMed

Publication types