Researchers study women’s wombs for link to obesity

October 25, 2009 by Shawn Douglas
Filed under: News, Pregnancy

Researchers in the US and Canada are finding potential links to a child’s future obesity and the weight of their mother at conception, but more research is required.

On a base level, it sounds reasonable that an obese expectant mother may pass some gene or chemical on to her unborn child, leaving the child with a similar proclivity towards obesity. But scientists are interested in finding provable links between a mother and child’s obesity, links that, with further research, could yield a healthier generation of people.

Researchers at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center in New York and Laval Hospital in Quebec have been looking at the children born from severely obese women who had a weight-loss surgery before or after child birth. They found that when mothers had weight-loss surgery before giving birth or conceiving, they had children less prone to severe obesity.

As the women who had the surgery didn’t typically change their diet or lifestyle afterwards, the researchers believe that the surgery itself is related. They discovered that the surgery had the effect of making the women’s digestive system less efficient causing lower sugar and fat levels in the blood stream and thus fewer calories to the womb.

However, the researchers weren’t able to pinpoint a particular gene or chemical that may have caused the lower levels of obesity in the children. Robert Waterland, of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, thinks that perhaps there’s a link to how critical genes are regulated during pregnancy. Chemical “tags” that attach to the developing embryo’s chromosomes may act like switches that control how effective certain genes function.

Waterland has conducted research with mice that are genetically prone to obesity. He found that while obese rats tended to give birth to obese offspring, obese rats fed with food containing a chemical cocktail prevented the genetic obesity trait from functioning as well in the offspring.

Waterland cautions that it’s too soon to tell if the blocking agent that worked in the rats would work in human medical trial. More work must be done to pinpoint the obesity signal that’s transmitted to offspring, but there are hopes that in the future, mothers may use diet or behavior modification to help their children’s obesity levels.

In the meantime, doctor’s recommend that obese women avoid pregnancy until they’ve lost weight, a tactic performed to help future children live a healthier life of their own. In addition, a doctor-approved exercise regime to keep weight gain down during pregnancy is also recommended.