Breastfeeding and the gut-brain axis: is there a role for melatonin?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it