Brown Bag Lunch series: Unraveling the rhythms of breastmilk bioactives, and their impact on infant behavior

In this work-in-progress, Dr. Fehrenkamp will present an IMCI-funded pilot in which she is recruiting ~30 breastfeeding mother–infant dyads for an intensive 24-hour protocol to quantify cortisol and melatonin dynamics across the maternal–milk–infant triad. Each dyad completes up to 10 repeated collections of maternal saliva, breast milk, and infant saliva over two days, along with feeding/sleep logs, and questionnaires on diet, stress, mood, and infant behavior; hormones and cytokines are measured by ELISA (cortisol) and LC-MS (melatonin) to capture real-world circadian profiles.

Dr. Fehrenkamp will share the analysis plan and early implementation for characterizing rhythms (cosinor analysis; GLMs/GLMMs with appropriate distributions and bootstrapped model selection), reducing the environmental/behavioral data using PCA, and linking these factors to hormone and cytokine rhythm parameters and infant outcomes. These results will inform and parameterize a dynamical systems framework (coupled oscillators/ODEs) of maternal–infant circadian coupling, and the goal of the discussion is to get feedback from IMCI biologists and modelers on model structure, identifiability, and how best to generalize this framework to additional breastmilk bioactives in future studies.

This session is happening AFTER the Fall Break. But mark your calendars, as we’ll be staring the week strong with Bethaney!