Authors
Yiheng Li, Yong Chen, Xueliang Huang, Jianhua Yang, ZhongBao Zhou, Xiaoying Ma, Longsheng Zeng
Published in
The journal of maternal-fetal & neonatal medicine : the official journal of the European Association of Perinatal Medicine, the Federation of Asia and Oceania Perinatal Societies, the International Society of Perinatal Obstetricians. Volume 39. Issue 1. Pages 2709189. Epub Jul 28, 2026.
Abstract
Neonatal jaundice is a common clinical condition, affecting approximately 60% of full-term infants and 80% of preterm infants. The majority of neonatal jaundice represents benign physiological hyperbilirubinemia that resolves spontaneously, yet a subset progresses to clinically significant hyperbilirubinemia (CSH), defined as elevated serum bilirubin requiring phototherapy or exchange transfusion to prevent permanent neurotoxic injury. The gut microbiota plays a crucial role in human health and disease, with inflammatory mediators frequently contributing to the body's response to illness or injury, often through their modulation of immune system function. As a result, the interplay between gut microbiota, inflammatory factors, and neonatal jaundice has garnered considerable research interest. Investigating the involvement of gut microbiota and inflammatory factors in neonatal jaundice holds the potential to inform the development of novel therapeutic strategies.
This study employed Mendelian Randomization (MR) to investigate the causal relationships between 418 gut microbiota taxa, 91 inflammatory factors, and clinically significant neonatal hyperbilirubinemia. Instrumental variables (IVs) genetic variants used as proxies for the exposure were selected from genome-wide association study (GWAS) summary statistics according to stringent criteria. Five well-established MR methods-namely, inverse variance weighting (IVW), MR-Egger, weighted median, simple mode, and weighted mode-were applied to evaluate the causal associations between gut microbiota composition and susceptibility to neonatal jaundice. Sensitivity analyses and tests for pleiotropy were performed on the MR results to assess the robustness and reliability of the findings.
Mendelian Randomization analysis identified ten bacterial taxa associated with neonatal jaundice. The consistency in the direction of beta values across nine microbial taxa further substantiates the robustness of these associations. Notably, the genus Slackia (id.825) exhibited a protective effect against neonatal jaundice, while the genus Adlercreutzia (id.812) was linked to an increased risk of this condition. Additionally, significant correlations were observed between Adlercreutzia and three inflammatory markers: β-nerve growth factor (NGF), C-X-C motif chemokine 1 (CXCL1), and interleukin-6 (IL-6).
This study provides evidence supporting associations between specific gut microbiota taxa and neonatal jaundice, as well as potential links with inflammatory markers. These findings are hypothesis-generating and should be interpreted cautiously, especially because the gut microbiome instruments were derived from adult cohorts rather than neonatal cohorts. They do not support immediate clinical recommendations regarding probiotics or antibiotics in newborns, but may help guide future mechanistic and pediatric validation studies.
PMID:
42521607
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 29 Jul 2026.
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