No one wants to have child who is born underweight,
but for numerous reasons, this may be unavoidable.
An intriguing research report involving rats
suggests that helping fetuses achieve optimal weight
before birth is of even greater importance than
currently believed: Underweight infants may
eventually become the grandparents of children at a
higher risk for metabolic problems like high
cholesterol, diabetes, and obesity.
This report appears in the March 2015 issue of The
FASEB Journal.
"It is our hope that these findings will spur on
studies in humans to study the impact of essential
nutrients not just for their impact on infant
birthweight and health, but longer term health
across the lifespan. Our data suggests that in rats,
low birthweight can be passed down from both the mom
and the dad, and that this cannot be altered by
essential nutrient supplementation in the mom or
dads diet," said Kjersti Aagaard, M.D., Ph.D., FACOG,
a researcher involved in the work from the Division
of Maternal-Fetal Medicine at Baylor College of
Medicine in Houston, Texas. "However, we can change
the adult health and risk of obesity, diabetes and
high cholesterol and bad lipids later in life. These
findings further underscore the importance of
long-term follow up studies in our patients, and
notably interventions in pregnancy which may have
long-term impacts which we cannot easily or reliably
measure at birth."
To make this discovery, Aagaard and colleagues
started with two groups of rats. One of these groups
had their blood vessels to the womb tied off toward
the end of pregnancy, leading to low birthweight
pups;
the second group underwent a "sham" surgery but did
not have their blood vessels to the womb tied.
All of the rats delivered naturally, giving rise to
the first generation of low birthweight and normal
rats. These rats were later allocated to the
nutrient-supplemented diet after weaning, or kept on
a regular diet.
When they reached early adult life, they were bred
to produce pups of their own (grandpups) and were
maintained on their allocated diets. These
pregnancies were not surgically manipulated, but the
grandpups were low birthweight if either of their
parents were low birthweight. These grandpups were
kept on the same diet as their parents and followed
up to 1 year of age (well into rat adulthood). They
were then tested for obesity with clinical DEXA
scans, for diabetes with clinical glucose tests and
special "clamp" studies, and fasting lipid levels
were measured. In some of the animals, liver and
other tissues were collected to study the epigenetic
changes to the DNA.
"Studies like these really change how we perceive
things like 'healthy' and 'wellness,'" said Gerald
Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB
Journal. "Our health and wellness is far more than
just our DNA, diet, environment and exercise. It's
also that of our parents and grandparents. Studies
like this can help inform health policy to focus on
repairable, epigenomic disease risks, rather than on
risk factors faced by any one person at any one time."
See also:
Inherited Memory of Environmental Impact on Health
May Be Limited (2014-08-17)
For more information
Danielle Goodspeed, Maxim D. Seferovic, William
Holland, Robert A. Mcknight, Scott A. Summers, D.
Ware Branch, Robert H. Lane, and Kjersti M. Aagaard.
Essential nutrient supplementation prevents
heritable metabolic disease in multigenerational
intrauterine growth-restricted rats.
FASEB J. March 2015 29:807-819;
doi:10.1096/fj.14-259614.
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