4. Discussion
anxiety, allergy, ’ mood, weakness, mastitis, depression, allergic diseases
ALLERGY, ALLERGY, SECONDARY, MASTITIS, EVENTS
According to the World Health Organization, stress has been defined as the “Health Epidemic of the 21st Century”. Indeed, the physical and psychological burden caused by long stress periods is increasing [Nowadays, it is well known that probiotic supplementation in women during the last trimester of gestation and breastfeeding shapes newborns’ immune systems. According to the 2015 World Allergy Organization guidelines, pregnant women whose infants are at high risk for allergy should assume probiotics as a preventive treatment. Indeed, probiotic integration positively stimulates the children’s immune system, decreasing the onset of allergic diseases [The majority of scientific studies available in the literature evaluate the immune system response and the GM composition of newborn babies in women taking probiotic supplements during the perinatal period [The aim of our study was to assess whether a supplement containing The evidence that women supplemented with probiotics had fewer symptoms of postnatal anxiety and depression caused by stress is consistent with two previous clinical studies evaluating the effect of probiotics on stress-related parameters in different target populations. The first study is a proof-of-concept trial of 30 students enrolled during an exam session and treated with a probiotic supplement containing the same strains According to this preliminary evidence, our study was designed to assess the effect of probiotics on mood and mental state in the period in which the first PPD symptoms emerge. It is worth noticing that the clinical protocol could not include evaluation questionnaires at T0 since they are not relevant before the occurrence of different and opposite emotional events (e.g., from excitement and joy to weakness and fright due to motherhood). However, this study demonstrated a significant improvement in mothers’ mood in the first trimester when supplemented with Remarkably, this study showed a significant daily improvement in baby crying/fussing events (To the best of our knowledge, only one other published study assessed PPD neurological parameters as a result of the effect of probiotics in new mothers. This study investigated the effect of In our study, the questionnaires used for the assessment of the mothers’ mood state and breastfeeding confidence lacked a basal score, as the selected questionnaires only referred to the postnatal period; indeed, they could not be properly filled at T0 since the mothers had just undergone delivery, without experiencing the wide range of emotional events linked to motherhood yet. For this reason, no evaluation was performed at T0 in order to avoid any alteration of the EPDS and BSES-EF questionnaires.As secondary outcome, mastitis incidence was taken into consideration to further characterize the lactation performance. However, since the two items of the BSES-SF questionnaire related to mastitis did not record any episodes, this outcome was not considered.