Poor Diet in Pregnancy Tied to Disease in Offspring: Rat Study
You may have a higher long-term risk of disease if your mother ate poorly during pregnancy, a new study in rats suggests.
U.K. researchers found that rats were more vulnerable to the effects of aging if their mothers were malnourished while they were pregnant. The study was published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In the study, a rodent mother's diet appeared to affect her offspring's expression later in life of a gene called Hnf4a, which plays a major role in the development of the pancreas and later in the production of insulin. Mothers with poor diets had offspring who expressed less of the Hnf4a gene, something that appeared to increase their risk of type 2 diabetes, a significant contributing factor to both heart disease and cancer.
No comments:
Post a Comment