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Johns Hopkins Medicine
Childhood exercise may stave off some bad effects of maternal obesity
Prenatal exposure to high-fat diets mitigated in offspring
Rats whose mothers were fed a high-fat diet during pregnancy and nursing were able to stave off some of the detrimental health effects of obesity by exercising during their adolescence, new Johns Hopkins research shows.
Even though the rat offspring weighed the same as their sedentary counterparts, the exercising rats had fewer fat deposits and their brains were better able to respond to a hormone known to suppress the appetite — long after they stopped running on their exercise wheels.
Because mammals (including rats and humans) share much of their biology, the findings suggest that childhood exercise might help mitigate some of the risks that human children of obese parents are biologically primed to follow in their parents' footsteps and to develop diabetes and other obesity-related disorders. A report on the research is published in the November issue of the American Journal of Physiology — Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology.
"Just three weeks of exercise early in life had a persistent effect on the satiety centers of the brains of these rat pups," says study leader Kellie L. K. Tamashiro, Ph.D., an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "If we can find a way to take advantage of that phenomenon in humans that would be great, because preventing obesity is probably going to be much easier to do than reversing it."
Tamashiro and her colleagues fed pregnant rats a high-fat diet and continued that diet while they were nursing their pups. The animals were weaned on a healthier, standard low-fat diet and at four weeks of age, the equivalent of rodent early adolescence, some were given free access to running wheels in their cages, while the others remained sedentary. The running wheels were taken away after three weeks.
To determine the impact of the exercise on appetite, at 14 weeks of age, the rats' brains were injected with the appetite-suppressing hormone leptin. Those that had exercised weeks before ate less, while the sedentary rats showed no differences in their appetites.
Leptin is naturally secreted by fat cells and helps many people to maintain a healthy weight. But obese people who have more leptin circulating in the bloodstream because they have more fat appear to develop insensitivity to the hormone, and at a certain point, their brains stop responding to it, Tamashiro says.
"There was something about the exercise that improved their leptin sensitivity, even the equivalent in humans of years later," she says.
She says their research suggests that exercise may better enable human brains to respond to leptin and eat less.
Previous research by Tamashiro and her Johns Hopkins team has shown that rats born to mothers fed high-fat diets but get normal levels of dietary fat right after birth avoid obesity and its related disorders as adults. They also found that rat pups exposed to a normal-fat diet in the womb but nursed by rat mothers on high-fat diets become obese by the time they are weaned.
Obese humans are often encouraged to exercise as part of a weight-loss program, but results are often frustration, Tamashiro says.
"Kids these days don't have as much opportunity for physical activity in school and are spending lots of time playing video games and engaging in other sedentary activities after school," she says. "Our research suggests that efforts to increase activity in kids could have positive long-term effects, regardless of whether they continue to exercise into adulthood."
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The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (HD-055030) and the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (DK-077623).
Other Johns Hopkins researchers involved in the study include Bo Sun, M.D.; Nu-Chu Liang, Ph.D.; Erin R. Ewald, Sc.M.; Ryan H. Purcell; Gretha J. Boersma, Ph.D.; Jianqun Yan, M.D., Ph.D.; and Timothy H. Moran, Ph.D.
For more information about the Behavioral Neuroscience Lab at Johns Hopkins, click here. For a link to information on Tamashiro's previous research, click here.
Johns Hopkins Medicine (JHM), headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland, is a $6.7 billion integrated global health enterprise and one of the leading health care systems in the United States. JHM unites physicians and scientists of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine with the organizations, health professionals and facilities of The Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System. JHM's vision, "Together, we will deliver the promise of medicine," is supported by its mission to improve the health of the community and the world by setting the standard of excellence in medical education, research and clinical care. Diverse and inclusive, JHM educates medical students, scientists, health care professionals and the public; conducts biomedical research; and provides patient-centered medicine to prevent, diagnose and treat human illness. JHM operates six academic and community hospitals, four suburban health care and surgery centers, and more than 30 primary health care outpatient sites. The Johns Hopkins Hospital, opened in 1889, was ranked number one in the nation for 21 years in a row by U.S. News & World Report.
Childhood exercise may stave off some bad effects of maternal obesity
Prenatal exposure to high-fat diets mitigated in offspring
2013-11-26
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[Press-News.org] Childhood exercise may stave off some bad effects of maternal obesityPrenatal exposure to high-fat diets mitigated in offspring