Posted April 20, 2009
A new study by University of Utah neonatologists indicates that a mother’s diet during pregnancy plays a significant role in whether her offspring develop chronic illnesses later in life. And these nutrition effects, known as the “unpleasant womb syndrome,” can be observed two generations down the line.
Deploying the young science of epigenetics, which explores the link between environment and how genes are “expressed,” the Utah group found that rats starved in utero appeared to be “programmed” for life in a nutritionally-challenged world. In other words, we are what our mothers didn’t eat, so take care of the mothers, scientists say.
“This emphasizes how important maternal health is to everyone’s health through adulthood,” said co-author Robert Lane, a U. professor of medicine. “Your mother’s and your grandmother’s health helps determine who gets the adult diseases we are all familiar with: diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease. Even neurodevelopment is incredibly determined by what happens early in life, whether it’s a fetus or as a newborn.”
The U. study, whose co-authors included Qi Fu, Xing Yu, Christopher Callaway and Robert McKnight, was published Monday by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.
“The new epigenetics has taught us how nature is changed by nurture,” said the organization’s editor-in-chief, Gerald Weissmann, director of New York University’s Biotechnology Study Center. “Prenatal care
is far more important than anyone could have imagined a decade ago.”
Lane and his colleagues studied the effects of constricted diet on baby and adolescent rats by surgically squeezing blood flow to the placenta of their mothers during pregnancy. Compared with pups from a control group, the pups nourished from altered uteri were born 25 percent lighter, but they grew into adults that were fatter and less intelligent. In these rats, the researchers observed changes in the gene governing levels of insulin growth factor, which controls metabolic function and cell growth.
The researchers attributed these lower levels to changes in the protein surrounding the critical gene, rather than to the gene’s DNA itself, Weissmann said.
He likened the relationship between the gene and the protein as one between a book and a light source in a dark room. If you change the position of the light source (the protein) you change the way the book (the gene) is read, or expressed.
“It turns out for the short term, there are genetic changes that mother can pass on for one or two generations determined by what happened in the womb,” Wiessmann said. “If the mother is subject to an insult, the child in the womb is a sitting duck and can also suffer that insult. You’ll have three generations subject to a problem.”
The study confirms what many have long suspected: Everyone, including pregnant mothers, should eat a nutritionally balanced diet, in moderation, and exercise. But it also gives clues to how medicine can address genetic health that has been compromised by poor maternal diet.
“Think of it as a weather forecast for the fetus,” Lane said. “There is hope we can modify these things, but we have to be careful how we modify them. If you do nonspecific interventions with dietary changes and drugs, we may turn on a good gene, but you may turn on a cancer gene at the same time. The goal is to improve health and do it as softly as possible.”
bmaffly@sltrib.com
April 15, 2009
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