204 Awardee Talk: Poor Maternal Nutrition Impacts Metabolic Factors and Glucose Tolerance in Sheep Offspring

Maternal obesity increases the risk of metabolic disease and impacts renal health in offspring

Obesity, together with insulin resistance, promotes multiple metabolic abnormalities and is strongly associated with an increased risk of chronic disease including type 2 diabetes (T2D), hypertension, cardiovascular disease, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and chronic kidney disease (CKD). The incidence of obesity continues to rise in astronomical proportions throughout the world and ...

Glucose tolerance and metabolic syndrome

Differential Pathways to Adult Metabolic Dysfunction following Poor Nutrition at Two Critical Developmental Periods in Sheep

Epidemiological and experimental studies suggest early nutrition has long-term effects on susceptibility to obesity, cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. Small and large animal models confirm the influence of different windows of sensitivity, from fetal to early postnatal life, on offspring phenotype. We showed previously that undernutrition in sheep either during the first month of gestation...

Poor maternal environment enhances offspring disease resistance in an invertebrate.

Natural populations vary tremendously in their susceptibility to infectious disease agents. The factors (environmental or genetic) that underlie this variation determine the impact of disease on host population dynamics and evolution, and affect our capacity to contain disease outbreaks and to enhance resistance in agricultural animals and disease vectors. Here, we show that changes in the envi...

Maternal nutrition and long-term consequences of the offspring.

adaptive responses in anticipation of a future poor nutritional environment, modifying its metabolism to become a thrifty phenotype, only to discover it has been born into an environment of nutritional excess. Such a predictive adaptation in utero which is mismatched with its later improved environment is thought to put the fetus at risk of developing obesity, type 2 diabetes, and other adult d...