Effects of Nutritional Rehabilitation on the Content and Lipid Composition of Brain Gray and White Matter of Neonatally Undernourished Rats

Abstract

Neonatal undernutrition affects the content and lipid concentrations of gray and white matter. Nutritional rehabilitation reverses the deficit observed in gray matter. In the case of white matter the lipid concentration but not the content comes back to normal.

Effects of Preweaning Undernutrition and Continued Postweaning Protein Deficiency or Nutritional Rehabilitation on Polyphosphoinositides in Rat Brain

“…Consistent with this is the observation that the deficit persists in the amount of myelin (Simons and Johnston, 1976;Reddy et al, 1979) and myelin lipids (Yusuf et al, 1981). Recent studies by Reddy et al (1982) have shown that with nutritional rehabilitation of neonatally undernourished rats, the deficits in lipid concentrations in the grey matter are reversed, but not those in the white matter.…”

“…The adverse effects of nutritional stress during the suckling period on the maturation of neurons (Cragg, 1972;Gambetti et al, 1974;Burns et al, 1975;Shoemaker and Bloom, 1976), glia (Siassi and Siassi, 1973;Krigman and Hogan, 1976), and myelin (Bass, et al, 1970b;Krigman and Hogan, 1976;Stewart et al, 1974;Griffin et al, 1977) are well documented. The concentrations of different lipids have been shown to be significantly reduced in neonatally undernourished rats (Culley and Mertz, 1965;Rajalakshmi and Nakhasi, 1974;Krigman and Hogan, 1976;Reddy and Sastry, 1978;Reddy et al, 1982).…”