Erwin Loh: High-Fructose Diet in Pregnancy Linked to Lasting Brain Changes
Erwin Loh, President of Royal Australasian College of Medical Administrators, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“High-Fructose Diet in Pregnancy Linked to Lasting Brain Changes
High maternal fructose intake may impair offspring brain development.
In a recent paper published in Stem Cell Reports, researchers found that the performance of adult rats in learning and memory tests was impaired when the rats had been exposed to high fructose in before birth by feeding their mothers with high fructose corn syrup.
Furthermore, neurogenesis, which is the generation of new neurons from neural stem cells (NSCs), in distinct regions of the brain involved in learning and cognition was reduced in those rats.
Further, the group discovered distinct changes in NSCs after high fructose exposure, which included reduced cell division and impaired generation of new neurons, and altered gene expression.
To explain why prenatal high fructose exposure can have such long-lasting effects on NSCs, the researchers profiled the so-called epigenetic changes, which are chemical imprints on the DNA controlling gene activity.
Strikingly, prenatal high fructose exposure introduced distinct epigenetic changes in fetal NSCs which persisted into adulthood and which deregulated the activity of genes important for adult neurogenesis.
Restoring normal expression of those genes improved the function of high fructose-exposed NSCs.
Source.”
Title: Neural stem cells as potential mediators of prenatal dietary stress through epigenetic mechanisms
Authors: Itsuki Kageyama, Hiroya Yamada, Mirai Yamazaki, Takuya Wakasugi, Yuri Kamiya, Masaki Ohshiro, Manaka Ito, Yoshiki Tsuboi, Takashi Watanabe, Genki Mizuno, Yoshitaka Ando, Hiroaki Ishikawa, Koji Suzuki, Koji Ohashi, Eiji Munetsuna
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