European funding to act in the prevention of obesity and dental cavities

The consortium “METAHEALTH: Health in a microbial, sociocultural and care context in the first thousand days of life”, which includes researchers from the Faculty of Dental Medicine of the University of Porto (FMDUP) and i3S, was recently funded by the Dutch Research Council with 10 million euros. This partnership will make it possible to accompany pregnant women and their babies for up to three years of age, compare the Dutch and Portuguese populations, and act in the prevention of obesity and dental cavities.

Led by researcher Egija Zaura from the Academic Center for Dentistry Amsterdam (ACTA, Netherlands), the project has the participation of 14 partners, 13 of which are Dutch and one is Portuguese. The researcher from FMDUP and i3S, Benedita Sampaio Maia, who leads the Portuguese participation, will receive 200 thousand euros to accompany 200 pregnant women and their children.

It is known that overweight, dental cavities and low socioeconomic status are often associated and this has negative consequences for the health and well-being of the child. This project, explains Benedita Sampaio Maia, has as main objectives “to deepen knowledge about the interaction between lifestyle, environment and microbiome during pregnancy and the first thousand days of life, to understand how child care can better respond to the needs and complexities children and families, and based on this knowledge, create effective interventions for the prevention of overweight and dental caries”.

The METAHEALTH consortium was joined by the Portuguese project “OralBioBorn - The oral microbiome throughout the first year of life and the influence of maternal factors on the acquisition of the oral microbiome of the newborn in a Portuguese population”, which is already underway and which will be now, with this funding, it has been extended up to three years of children’s lives.

«OralBioBorn», led by Benedita Sampaio Maia “is a prospective cohort study in which 200 healthy, obese, hypertensive pregnant women with gestational diabetes are being recruited and mother-child pairs are being evaluated up to one year after delivery”. The objective, adds the researcher “is to longitudinally describe the evolution of the microbiome in mother-child pairs, as well as to correlate maternal cardiometabolic diseases and their impact on the microbiome of early life. For this, the initial idea would be to collect biological samples (oral, fecal and breast milk), clinical and anthropometric data from these pairs in the 3rd trimester of pregnancy and 1, 6 and 12 months after delivery. With this partnership, we will extend the study of these children up to three years of age and correlate their microbiome with the development of dental caries and overweight”.

Also participating in this evaluation and follow-up study of 200 Portuguese mother-child pairs are researchers Carla Ramalho (i3S, FMUP and CHUSJ), Inês Falcão Pires (FMUP), and two PhD students Maria João Azevedo (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam – ACTA and i3S) and Ana Filipa Ferreira (FMUP).