The impact of prenatal stress in the development of obesity

JUAREZ, YAMILA R; MERCADO, ALEJANDRO E; GONZALEZ MURANO, MA ROSA; GENARO, ANA MARIA; BURGUEÑO, ADRIANA L

Mar del Plata

Congreso; LXI Reunion Anual de la Sociedad Argentina de investigacion Clinica; 2016

Sociedad Argentina de Investigacion Clinica

According to the "fetal programming hypothesis", prenatal exposure to suboptimal intrauterine conditions could predispose the individual to chronic disease at adult age. Over the past decades,obesity has increased its worldwide prevalence. Therefore identifying the factors that predispose its development is essential. In the present work, we studied the effect of prenatal stress (PS) on thedevelopment of obesity. For this purpose pregnant C57BL/6J female mice were stressed during the last week of pregnancy for 2 h daily (from 10 AM to 12) by placing them in a plastic restraining tube. Non-exposed control pregnant females were left undisturbed during all the gestation period (NPS). At 4th week of age, both PS and NPS offspring were fed with one of the following diets: High Fat diet (HFD, 4800kcal/kg) or a standard diet (SD, 3000kcal/kg). After 12weeks of diet, PS/SD males showed no differences in body weight compared to 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 had more body weight than SD (p <0.001). After 16 weeks of diet we observed a difference 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. When we 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 with SD (p<0.00001). While females showed no signifcant difference. We conclude that the PS predisposes the development of obesity in male mice, but this only happens under the intake of a HFD. Furthermore, these results suggest that exists a sexual dimorphism response to thedevelopment of obesity after prenatal stress.