Human Milk Oligosaccharide Compositions Illustrate Global Variations in Early Nutrition.

Background: Human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) are an abundant class of compounds found in human milk and have been linked to the development of the infant, and specifically the brain, immune system, and gut microbiome.

Objectives: Advanced analytical methods were used to obtain relative quantitation of many structures in approximately 2000 samples from over 1000 mothers in urban, semirural, and rural sites across geographically diverse countries.

Methods: LC-MS-based analytical methods were used to profile the compounds with broad structural coverage and quantitative information.

Variation among populations in the immune protein composition of mother's milk reflects subsistence pattern.

Lay Summary: Adaptive immune proteins in mothers' milk are more variable than innate immune proteins across populations and subsistence strategies. These results suggest that the immune defenses in milk are shaped by a mother's environment throughout her life.

Background And Objectives: Mother's milk contains immune proteins that play critical roles in protecting the infant from infection and priming the infant's developing immune system during early life.

Concentrations of trace elements in human milk: Comparisons among women in Argentina, Namibia, Poland, and the United States.

Human milk contains essential micronutrients for growth and development during early life. Environmental pollutants, such as potentially toxic metals, can also be transferred to the infant through human milk. These elements have been well-studied, but changing diets and environments and advances in laboratory technology require re-examining these elements in a variety of settings.

Illness in breastfeeding infants relates to concentration of lactoferrin and secretory Immunoglobulin A in mother's milk.

Background And Objectives: This study aims to better understand the relationship between immune compounds in human milk and infant health. We hypothesized that the concentration of immune compounds in milk would relate to infant illness symptoms according to two possible theoretical paradigms. In the 'protective' paradigm, high concentrations of immune compounds prevent infant illness.

Oxytocin and Epstein-Barr virus: Stress biomarkers in the postpartum period among first-time mothers from São Paulo, Brazil.

Objectives: The purpose of the study was to examine the relationship between self-reported stress levels among new mothers in São Paulo, Brazil and two biomarkers of stressful experience, oxytocin (OT) and Epstein-Barr Virus antibody level (EBV-ab), with planned pregnancy hypothesized as a moderator of biological response to stressful conditions.

Methods: Sixty-three first-time mothers between the ages of 15 and 45 were recruited from neighborhoods in São Paulo, Brazil. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected longitudinally, bi-weekly between two and 12 weeks postpartum.

Puberty as a life history transition.

Background: James Tanner's landmark publication, Growth at Adolescence, was not only the first and most comprehensive treatise on the subject of human pubertal development of its time, its core insights have held up remarkably well over time.

Review: This review connects Tanner's contributions to contemporary understanding of puberty as a process fundamentally driven by neuroendocrine maturation. It introduces the concepts of the 'hour-glass of puberty' and 'somatic strategy' as heuristic constructs.

Specific gravity as an alternative to creatinine for estimating urine concentration in captive and wild chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) Samples.

The measurement of hormones in urine has become a widely used technique in primatology. Because urine concentration varies according to fluid intake, concentration must be measured in each sample collected, and hormone values are always expressed per unit of concentration. Traditionally, creatinine has been used as a concentration index, but some studies in humans have shown that creatinine varies among populations and even within and between individuals within a population, and that it begins to degrade after just one freeze-thaw cycle.