Baby Gut Health Test Walkthrough - Tiny Health

Hi, I'm Emily Serda. I'm a microbiome specialist here with Tiny Health and I'm going to go over some of the key differences in our infant gut health testing. If you're new to our testing, I strongly recommend that you check out our gut health test orientation video where I go through all the metrics to really orient you to your portal and to the results on this video. I'm just going to focus on the infant testing and a few metrics that are different from the other age group testing. So here in the results portal you can see we have baby Nico, 8 weeks old. And a few things that stand out that are a little different in our infant testing is that we will have a gut maturation index. So here we can see baby Nico's gut trajectory and about how old his microbiome appears to be. If I click into that, we do get this maturation index. We want babies to have low gut maturation. They should have a very Bifidobacterium dominant gut, which means that there's not a lot of other microbe types in that gut. Then as children age, they start solids. We start to develop more and more diversity up into adulthood where better diversity, more diversity is desired. Here we can see at two months old, baby Nico's gut looks like it is three and a half months old, which is great. It's right within this green range, which is where we would want it to be. You can see some of the associations if this metric is out of range. You can also read all about the gut maturation index and what we're taking into consideration with this metric. If I back to the results again, in infants who also have MOM seed or have mom test, we will get microbiome seeding results. So if mom tests within that first six months and we also have a baby test, we can actually compare the two tests and see what portion of the microbiome has seeded from mom and what portion has seeded from the environment in baby. So this is, this is very interesting information, can be fascinating to see what has been passed on. You'll also see in baby results and in adult results these microbiome breakdown here that has the gut type. So for infants we do have a number of different gut types and you can click in here to read about the different types. The gut type is determined by the dominant bacteria in the microbiome. So here we can see A1B is a Bifidobacterium dominant gut. Although we'll see in the rest of the report that this bifido level could ideally be a little bit higher. If you have questions about gut type and you would like to learn a little bit more about this to prepare your patients, you can click on this link here where it says, how does your baby's results compare? And you will open up a blog post that talks all about the different gut types for babies in more depth. Okay. In baby Nico's results here, I'm also going to go into the see all metrics button. So there are a few metrics that are a little different for infants. We will still have Bifidobacterium as a beneficial bacteria, which is in all of our reports. But we're also going to get this metric called HMO digesting species. This will show up for infants, toddlers, people who are trying to conceive and are pregnant. So the HMO digesting species actually represent a type of Bifidobacterium. If I scroll down here, we can see that there are four different, four different species of Bifidobacteria that are HMO degraders. These HMO degraders are really important to help baby digest and benefit from the complex sugars in breast milk or in formula. So we do measure these here. So you can see you're going to get an ideal range for HMO digesting species and you will also get an ideal range for Bifidobacterium. So for this example, this child is almost an ideal range for HMO digesting species. But ideally we would have maybe a little bit more Bifidobacterium, especially if there are symptoms associated with that. As I back out and we look at other metrics in the test under the disruptive microbes where we list pathogens. If I scroll down, we will see the C section signature metric. This is really looking at some of the patterns that we see in C section born children versus those who were born vaginally. And we look at the different microbiomes, microbes that are usually present in each situation. So often this C section signature, you can see the very first test that this child did, they had the C section signature and that went down over time. And that is usually linked to the amount of Bifidobacterium present in the gut because again, we want it to be a bifido dominant gut with low diversity. Other metrics that will be different in the infant gut test, of course, all of our reference ranges are different in the digestion and absorption markers. We will only list the HMO digestion capacity because this child has not started solids at eight weeks. Old, the microbiome has not been introduced to fiber, nor should it be. And so we're not going to report on how those fiber types, complex sugars, proteins, things like that are being handled by the microbiome just yet. Okay, and then in balance and robustness section, again, this maturation index. So this is just the same as what we saw on that front page where we looked at the gut age. It's the very same information, but a different way to get there. And microbial enzymes and metabolites, you'll see that we really refine this only to histamine producing species. And some of those other metrics aren't there. Again, that's because we have a very low diversity gut. Really, the gut's job at this point is to benefit from those HMOs, those complex sugars in breast milk or formula for the baby. And they haven't been exposed to anything that would build diversity or these other digestive functions just yet. So I hope that is helpful for going through the infant gut test again. If you're new to our gut testing, please check out the Gut Health test orientation video and that will give you a solid foundation. If you run into questions, you can always reach out to us and book a results review call. We'd love to talk you through any specific questions you have.