Acute nutritional stress during pregnancy affects placental efficiency, fetal growth and adult glucose homeostasis

Sajida Malik; Alan Diot; Karl Morten; Eszter Dombi; Manu Vatish; C.A. Richard Boyd; Joanna Poulton

doi:10.18632/oncotarget.22695

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Research Papers:

Acute nutritional stress during pregnancy affects placental efficiency, fetal growth and adult glucose homeostasis

Sajida Malik, Alan Diot, Karl Morten, Eszter Dombi, Manu Vatish, C.A. Richard Boyd and Joanna Poulton _

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Oncotarget. 2017; 8:109478-109486. https://doi.org/10.18632/oncotarget.22695

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Abstract

Sajida Malik1, Alan Diot1, Karl Morten1, Eszter Dombi1, Manu Vatish1, C.A. Richard Boyd2 and Joanna Poulton1

1Nuffield Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

2Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Correspondence to:

Joanna Poulton, email: [email protected]

Keywords: placenta; fetal weight; stress; placental efficiency; glucose homeostasis

Received: June 05, 2017 Accepted: September 01, 2017 Published: November 25, 2017

ABSTRACT

Exposure to maternal malnutrition impairs postnatal health. Acute nutritional stress is less clearly implicated in intrauterine programming.

We studied the effects of stressing pregnant mothers on perinatal growth and adult glucose homeostasis. We compared one group (“stressed”, mothers fasted for 16 hours) with controls (“unstressed”). We found that fasting stress had adverse effects on the weight of the fetuses conceived (p<0.005) and the placental efficiency (p<0.001) in stressed compared to unstressed offspring. Placental weight was increased (p<0.001) presumably in compensation.

Stress affected the glucose homeostasis of the offspring when they became adults (p<0.005) when analysed as individuals.

We previously linked nutritional stress throughout pregnancy with a mitochondrial stress response. We modelled placenta with cultured human trophoblast cells (BeWos) and fetal tissues with mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs). High throughput imaging showed that the mitochondria of both cell types underwent a similar sequence of changes in morphology, induced by nutritional stresses.

The contrasting stress responses on fetal and placental weight were not captured by the cellular models. The stress of maternal fasting may be an important determinant of perinatal outcome in the mouse and might be relevant to nutritional stress in human pregnancy.

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Research Papers:

Acute nutritional stress during pregnancy affects placental efficiency, fetal growth and adult glucose homeostasis

Abstract