2023-05-18 13:15:35
A recent study has explored the extent to which obesity and diabetes in pregnant women affect the future health of their son or daughter.
This research has shown that the sons and daughters of the women under study who were obese or diabetic during pregnancy developed certain epigenetic alterations that predisposed them to suffering diseases such as diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular problems resulting from such ailments. This risk not only exists during childhood and adolescence, but also persists into later stages of life.
The study was carried out by pediatricians from the General Hospital of Valencia, the Network Biomedical Research Center for Physiopathology of Obesity and Nutrition (CIBEROBN), the University of Valencia and the INCLIVA Health Research Institute of Valencia, in collaboration with the Cancer Epigenetics and Nanomedicine Group (CINN, attached to the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC)), the University of Oviedo and the Center for Biomedical Research in Rare Diseases Network (CIBERER), all of these entities in Spain.
“Pregnancy is a fundamental period in the life of human beings that actively affects the development of offspring, and their predisposition to the future appearance of cardiometabolic diseases. Disorders such as maternal obesity and gestational diabetes can condition the health of the offspring, from childhood to adulthood, increasing the risk of comorbidities that reduce quality and life expectancy”, explains Empar Lurbe, CIBEROBN Principal Investigator in the Group Research for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Risk in Children and Adolescents of INCLIVA.
On the other hand, and in the opinion of Mario Fraga, a CIBERER researcher and another of the coordinators of the study at the University of Oviedo, “maternal obesity during pregnancy can affect 30% of pregnant women, with the resulting repercussions for health systems and their public health policies. However, beyond the epidemiological evidence, the molecular causes responsible for these negative effects on the health of the offspring are unknown.
Image above: CIBEROBN team at INCLIVA, University of Valencia. (Photo: CIBEROBN / University of Valencia). Bottom image: CIBERER team at the University of Oviedo. (Photo: CIBERER / University of Oviedo)
The study has made it possible to describe epigenetic alterations in the offspring, beyond birth, associated with the maternal metabolic condition during pregnancy. These chemical modifications influence the regulation of genes, and their alteration is behind the development of multiple diseases with a great social impact, such as obesity.
To reach these conclusions, the team, led by Juan José Alba-Linares from the University of Oviedo and CIBERER, carried out an analysis in a pediatric cohort of boys and girls born to obese or obese mothers with gestational diabetes. One of the greatest strengths of the study is the longitudinal follow-up, which has been carried out throughout the first year of life in the Pediatric Service of the General Hospital of Valencia, and which has made it possible to clarify the molecular traces by which mothers are capable of to influence the genome of their offspring continuously over time.
The research team explains that this study represents a new example of how the environment interacts with our genes. In this case, the results indicate that the state of health and the metabolic condition of the pregnant mother can condition the state of health of the children persistently, which may have important implications for public health issues.
This work constitutes the first evidence that the intrauterine environment and, more specifically, obesity and gestational diabetes, are capable of persistently reprogramming the methylation patterns of offspring, beyond birth.
The alterations involve genes that are part of regulatory pathways for fatty acid metabolism, cardiovascular signaling or mitochondrial bioenergetics, crucial processes in obesity and diabetes mellitus. Detecting these alterations in peripheral blood reinforces the idea that maternal metabolism has systemic effects on child development.
The study is titled “Maternal obesity and gestational diabetes reprogram the methylome of offspring beyond birth by inducing epigenetic signatures in metabolic and developmental pathways”. And it has been published in the academic journal Cardiovascular Diabetology. (Source: CIBER / Carlos III Health Institute (ISCIII))
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