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January 3, 2008Mom's Obesity During Conception Phase May Set the Stage for Offspring's Obesity Risk |
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From EurekAlert! - Breaking News: The number of overweight and obese Americans continues to grow rapidly. Research studies have found that pregnant women who are overweight/obese are more likely to give birth to heavier babies, and the risk of overweight children becoming obese adults is nearly nine times greater than for children who are not overweight. Inheritance studies show that a child's body mass index (BMI) correlates more closely with the mother's BMI than with it's father's, suggesting that an interaction of both genetic and intrauterine influences, may contribute to later-life obesity risk in the offspring. In a new report, investigators studied whether fetal exposure to gestational obesity leads to a self-reinforcing viscious cycle of excessive weight gain and body fat which passes from mother to child. The journal is one of 11 published each month by the American Physiological Society (APS; http://www.the-aps.org/). To test the theory that obesity in adulthood may be subject to programming during fetal development, the researchers developed an overfeeding model which was used in rats. The model allowed the investigators to replicate many of the metabolic and hormonal features of overweight human individuals. They were also able to exclude parental genetic influences, match gestational weight gain, limit the exposure of maternal obesity in utero, and control lactation efficiency, all of which can be difficult confounding variables in studies with human subjects. In the preliminary experiments, the rats consuming the normal caloric intake had weight gains similar to controls while those being fed the obesegenic diet had become substantially overweight.
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