Breastfeeding and the gut-brain axis: is there a role for melatonin?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The benefits of breastfeeding over formula feed are widely appreciated. However, for many mothers breastfeeding is not possible, highlighting the need for a significant improvement in the contents of formula feed. In this article, the overlooked role of melatonin and the melatonergic pathways in breast milk and in the regulation of wider breast milk components are reviewed. There is a growing appreciation that the benefits of breastfeeding are mediated by its effects in the infant gut, with consequences for the development of the gut-brain axis and the immune system. The melatonergic pathways are intimately associated with highly researched processes in the gut, gut microbiome and gut-brain axis. As the melatonergic pathways are dependent on the levels of serotonin availability as a necessary precursor, decreased melatonin is linked to depression and depression-associated disorders. The association of breastfeeding and the gut-brain axis with a host of medical conditions may be mediated by their regulation of processes that modulate depression susceptibility. The biological underpinnings of depression include increased levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines, oxidative stress, kynurenine pathway activity and dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary adrenal axis, all of which can decrease melatonergic pathway activity. The inclusion of the melatonergic pathways in the biological interactions of breast milk and gut development has significant theoretical and treatment implications, as well as being important to the prevention of a host of infant-, child- and adult-onset medical conditions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".