Famine alters metabolism for successive generations

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-12/bu-fam121216.php

Public Release: 12-Dec-2016
Famine alters metabolism for successive generations
Brown University

The increased risk of hyperglycemia associated with prenatal exposure to famine is also passed down to the next generation, according to a new study of hundreds of families affected by widespread starvation in mid-20th Century China.

Hyperglycemia is a high blood glucose level and a common sign of diabetes. The new study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition reports that hundreds of people who were gestated during a horrific famine that afflicted China between 1959 and 1961 had significantly elevated odds of both hyperglycemia and type 2 diabetes. Even more striking, however, was that their children also had significantly higher odds of hyperglycemia, even though the famine had long since passed when they were born.

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Because the study only shows an association between metabolic changes and in utero famine exposure, it can't prove causality or the biological mechanism underlying a cause. But prior research on the effects of famine in humans and in laboratory animals suggest that famine does indeed cause such health risks, the study authors said.

"It is indeed a remarkable finding that is consistent what with what one would have expected from prior findings from animal experiments," said lead author Jie Li, a Brown postdoctoral fellow.

A prior team's study in mice showed a multigenerational effect on metabolism, and other studies of famine exposure in people have produced evidence of changes in the endocrine systems and in prenatal gene expression in reproductive systems.

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"Genetic, epigenetic reprogramming, and subsequent gene-diet interaction are all possible explanations," he said. "By establishing this Chinese famine cohort of families, we hope to conduct a much more comprehensive and in-depth assessment of the whole genome and epigenome along with metabolic biomarkers of these participants moving forward."