Still, it may be a risk worth taking for stunted children who don’t get help with diet alone, Dr. Ahmed said.
To identify this population, the researchers recruited more than 500 children from an urban district in Dhaka, Bangladesh, from 2016 to 2018; all were around 18 months old and at high risk for stunted growth. For three months, each child received eggs, milk, vitamins, and minerals, as well as deworming medications to flush out unwanted infections from her gut.
Most of the children in the study gained weight and grew, but just over a fifth of them remained stubbornly small. Most of his small intestines showed signs of inflammation, researchers say, a possible indicator of EED.
An analysis of their intestinal content also revealed that many of the children harbored several of the same types of bacteria in the small intestine. None of the microbial members of this “core group” of errors was “what you would call a classic pathogen,” said Dr. Gordon. And yet, “the more bacterial strains you have, the worse the growth retardation will be,” he said. “It was an incredible surprise for us.”
The team then transferred a subset of these bacteria to germ-free mice, each raised without their own gut microbes. Shortly after the microbes settled in the animals’ small intestine, the tissues began to deteriorate, an apparent imitation of the friendly inflammatory fire seen in many children with signs of stunted growth.
That the bacteria alone can cause intestinal inflammation in mice is “huge, in my opinion,” said Honorine Ward, a microbiologist and immunologist at Tufts University who was not involved in the study.
Although it is not yet clear whether these dynamics will develop in the same way in people, “this is very compelling and a very good start,” said Ana Maria Porras, a microbiologist and tissue engineer at Cornell University, who was also not a part of The research team.
