THE IMPACT OF THE PRENATAL STRESS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF OBESITY

JUÁREZ YAMILA R ; MERCADO ALEJANDRO EMILIANO ; GONZÁLEZ MURANO MARÍA ROSA; GENARO ANA MARÍA; BURGUEÑO ADRIANA LAURA

Mar del Plata

Congreso; XLVIII REUNION ANUAL DE LA SOCIEDAD ARGENTINA DE FARMACOLOGIA EXPERIMENTAL-SAFE; 2016

SAIC SAI SAFE AACYTAL

According to the fetal programming hypothesis, prenatal exposure to suboptimalintrauterine conditions could predispose the individual to chronic disease atadult age. Over the past decades, obesity has increased its worldwideprevalence. Therefore identifying the factors that predispose its developmentis essential. In the present work, we studied the effect of prenatal stress(PS) on the development of obesity. For this purpose pregnant C57BL/6J female micewere stressed during the last week of pregnancy for 2 h daily (from 10 AM to12) by placing them in a plastic restraining tube. Non-exposed control pregnantfemales were left undisturbed during all the gestation period (NPS). At 4thweek of age, both PS and NPS offspring were fed with one of the followingdiets: High Fat diet (HFD, 4800kcal/kg) or a standard diet (SD, 3000kcal/kg).After 12 weeks of diet, PS/SD males showed no differences in body weight comparedto NPS/SD. Instead, PS/HFD males gained more body weight than the NPS/HFD (p<0.05). Within the group of PS males we observed that those fed with HFD hadmore body weight than SD (p <0.001). After 16 weeks of diet we observed adifference in body weight between PS/HFD vs PS/SD females (p<0.01). Unlike males,PS/HFD vs NPS/HFD females did not show a difference in their body weight. Whenwe performed a glucose tolerance test, we observed that all males (PS + NPS)fed with HFD showed a higher area under the curve than those who were fed withSD (p<0.00001). While females showed no significant difference. We concludethat the PS predisposes the development of obesity in male mice, but this onlyhappens under the intake of a HFD. Furthermore, these results suggest thatexists a sexual dimorphism response to the development of obesity after prenatalstress.