Preventing metabolic disease may start in the womb ... of your grandmother

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-03/foas-pmd030215.php

Public Release: 2-Mar-2015
Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology

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."

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