Quantifying and Interpreting the Association between Early-Life Gut Microbiota Composition and Childhood Obesity

Abstract

We read with interest the recent article by Stanislawski et al. (1) on the association of early-life gut microbiota composition with child body mass index (BMI) in the exquisitely phenotyped Norwegian Microbiota Study (NoMIC) birth cohort. The authors observed that gut microbiota compositions among 165 Norwegian children at 10 days and 2 years of age were significantly associated with BMI at 12 years. They reported R 2 values from random-forest analyses and interpreted these values as the proportion of BMI …