1. Introduction
stunting, diarrhea, malnutrition
MALNOURISHED, WASTED, MALNUTRITION
These authors contributed equally to this work.Deceased.The profile of the intestinal microbiota is known to be altered in malnourished young children in low- and middle-income countries. However, there are limited studies longitudinally evaluating the intestinal microbiota in malnourished young children in resource-limited settings over the first two years of life. In this longitudinal pilot study, we determined the effect of age, residential location, and intervention on the composition, relative abundance, and diversity of the intestinal microbiota in a representative sample of children under 24 months of age with no diarrhea in the preceding 72 h in the urban and rural areas of Sindh, Pakistan nested within a cluster-randomized trial evaluating the effect of zinc and micronutrients on growth and morbidity (ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT00705445). The major findings were age-related with significant changes in alpha and beta diversity with increasing age. There was a significant increase in the relative abundance of the Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes phyla and a significant decrease in that of the Actinobacteria and Proteobacteria phyla (Nutritional compromise, especially stunting among children under 5 years of age, remains a global problem, with an estimated 149 million children affected worldwide in 2021 and an additional 45 million children wasted [The gut microbiome has been increasingly implicated in malnutrition in young children in resource-limited settings (reviewed in [We undertook a longitudinal study to determine the effect of age and residential location on the composition and diversity of the intestinal microbiota in children under 24 months of age in the urban and rural areas of Sindh, Pakistan nested within a cluster-randomized trial evaluating the effect of zinc and micronutrients on growth and morbidity (ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT00705445) [