Evidence from 3-month-old infants shows that a combination of postnatal feeding and exposures in utero shape lipid metabolism

Abstract

We tested the hypothesis that both postnatal feeding and conditions in utero affect lipid metabolism in infants. Infants who experienced restrictive growth conditions in utero and others exposed to maternal hyperglycaemia were compared to a control group with respect to feeding mode. Dried blood spots were collected from a pilot subset of infant participants of the Cambridge Baby Growth Study at 3mo. Groups: (a) a normal gestation (control, n = 40), (b) small for gestational age (SGA, n = 34) and (c) whose mothers developed hyperglycaemia (n = 59). These groups were further stratified by feeding mode; breastfed, formula-fed or received a mixed intake. Their phospholipid, glyceride and sterol fractions were profiled using direct infusion mass spectrometry. Statistical tests were used to identify molecular species that indicated differences in lipid metabolism. The abundance of several phospholipids identified by multivariate analysis, PC(34:1), PC(34:2) and PC-O(34:1), was 30–100% higher across all experimental groups. SM(39:1) was around half as abundant in in utero groups among breastfed infants only. The evidence from this pilot study shows that phospholipid metabolism is modulated by both conditions in utero and postnatal feeding in a cohort of 133 Caucasian infants, three months post partum.

A high-throughput platform for detailed lipidomic analysis of a range of mouse and human tissues

“…Discovery of candidate biomarkers (CBMs) is an established technique for identifying the variables that both distinguish two groups and drive the statistical difference between them [13,16,24,26]. This involves running a sparse partial least squares discriminant analysis [35] followed by a student's t test with a significance threshold adjusted for multiple variables and/or comparisons as appropriate.…”

“…There is mounting evidence that lipid metabolism has a crucial role in growth and metabolic disease in humans [12][13][14][15][16]. This has encouraged the development of methods required for lipid profiling.…”

Lipid Traffic Analysis reveals the impact of high paternal carbohydrate intake on offsprings’ lipid metabolism

“…Beyond the serious risk to their metabolic health, obesity in both men and women has long-term consequences for their offspring through nutritional programming 1 – 3 . There is increasing evidence showing that the nutritional programming of offspring occurs through changes in lipid metabolism 4 and leads to increased risk of cardio-metabolic disease 5 – 9 . One contributor to obesity is excess carbohydrate intake.…”

Altered triglyceride and phospholipid metabolism predates the diagnosis of gestational diabetes in obese pregnancy

“…However, studies of a cohort not selected for BMI found evidence for shifts in lipid metabolism associated with GDM, at a molecular level. 28,29 We have also characterised the early second trimester lipoprotein profile in obese pregnancy and GDM and found that the abundance of VLDLs, small LDLs and HDLs differs in women who develop GDM compared to those who do not. 30 Collectively, this evidence suggests that both lipid biosynthesis and distribution are altered in advance of a standard diagnosis of GDM.…”

“…To test this hypothesis, we profiled the organically-soluble fraction (containing the lipids, glyceride and sterols) using state-of-the-art lipidomics methods on plasma samples collected at 15-18 weeks gestation from the UPBEAT [30][31][32] cohort of obese pregnant women. Molecular profiling involved direct infusion mass spectrometry (DI-MS 28,[33][34][35][36][37] ) with chipbased nanospray, in both positive and negative ionisation modes. A supervised multi-variate analysis (sparse Partial Least Squares-Discriminant Analysis, sPLS-DA) followed by a student's T-test was used to identify lipid molecular species that distinguished participants who were later diagnosed with GDM from those who did not develop GDM, and to identify the variables that drive this distinction.…”