The hypothalamic transcriptional response to stress is severely impaired in offspring exposed to adverse nutrition during gestation.
Grissom NM, George R, Reyes TM. (2017) Neuroscience 342 200-211. Epub 2015 Jul 26.
Abstract:
Gestation is a time of profound vulnerability, as insults during pregnancy increase the lifelong risk of morbidity for the offspring. Increasingly, maternal diet is recognized as a key factor influencing the developing fetus. Poor-quality maternal diets, whether they provide an excess or an insufficiency of nutrients, lead to overt gestational growth disturbances in the offspring, and elevated risk for a common cluster of metabolic and mental disorders.
Metabolic disturbances, particularly a substantially increased risk of obesity, have been linked in both maternal overnutrition and maternal undernutrition with abnormal development of the offspring hypothalamus, which serves a vital role in the central regulation of feeding. Additionally, the hypothalamus also coordinates physiological responses to stressors, and may thus play a role in vulnerability to psychiatric disease in these offspring.
We examined hypothalamic molecular and endocrine responses to a psychological stressor (restraint) and a physiological stressor (lipopolysaccharide; LPS) in adult offspring from dams fed a high-fat diet or a low-protein diet during gestation and lactation.
Targeted gene expression in the hypothalamus for 26 genes of interest sorted via hierarchical clustering revealed that the vast majority of these transcripts were substantially upregulated by both stressors.
In contrast, offspring of maternal high-fat and low-protein diets mounted essentially no gene expression response to either stressor. However, male and female offspring of all conditions showed elevated hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal glucocorticoid responses to both stressors, though the recovery of corticosterone responses after stress termination was significantly impaired in offspring of poor-quality maternal diets.
Overall, it appears that the ability of the hypothalamus to respond in the immediate aftermath of stressful experiences is severely impaired in offspring of poor-quality maternal diets, regardless of whether the diet provided insufficient nutrients or excessive nutrients.
Food and Behaviour Research is a registered charity (No SC034604) and a company limited by guarantee (Co No SC 253448)
Newsletter Signup
Useful Links
Contact Us
FAB Research
23 Carlton Road
Oxford
OX2 7SA
Important Notice
Medical opinion and guidance should always be sought for any symptoms that might possibly reflect a known or suspected disease, disorder or medical condition. Information provided on this website (or by FAB Research via any other means) does not in any way constitute advice on the treatment of any medical condition formally diagnosed or otherwise.
Site by Redstone Websites. Easy to Use Web Content Management. 2024 © All Rights Reserved.