The Relationship between Maternal Plasma Leptin and Adiponectin Concentrations and Newborn Adiposity

Abstract

Increased maternal blood concentrations of leptin and decreased adiponectin levels, which are common disturbances in obesity, may be involved in offspring adiposity by programming fetal adipose tissue development. The aim of this study was to assess the relationship between maternal leptin and adiponectin concentrations and newborn adiposity. This was a cross-sectional study involving 210 healthy mother-newborn pairs from a public maternity hospital in São Paulo, Brazil. Maternal blood samples were collected after delivery and leptin and adiponectin concentrations were measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Newborn body composition was estimated by air displacement plethysmography. The association between maternal leptin and adiponectin concentrations and newborn adiposity (fat mass percentage, FM%) was evaluated by multiple linear regression, controlling for maternal age, socioeconomic status, parity, pre-pregnancy body mass index (BMI), weight gain, gestational age, and newborn age at the time of measurement. No relationship was found between maternal leptin and FM% of male or female newborn infants. Maternal adiponectin (p = 0.001) and pre-pregnancy BMI (p < 0.001; adj. R2 = 0.19) were positively associated with FM% of newborn males, indicating that maternal adiponectin is involved in fetal fat deposition in a sex-specific manner. Large-scale epidemiological, longitudinal studies are necessary to confirm our results.

Leptin in Maternal Plasma and Cord Blood as a Predictor of Offspring Adiposity at 5 Years: A Follow‐up Study

“…Prior research has not consistently shown a concomitant relationship between maternal leptin levels and AT development in offspring . Consistent with other studies , we observed that lower cord blood leptin was associated with heavier 3‐ and 4‐year‐old children with higher BMI percentiles.…”

Newborn adipokines and early childhood growth

“…Despite some significant positive associations at 3 and 4 years of age with sum of skinfolds and percent body fat, the investigators concluded that cord blood concentrations of HMW adiponectin did not seem to be a useful biomarker of adiposity in early childhood . It may even be debated whether birth levels are reflective of neonatal adiposity . Our results suggested only positive associations with adiponectin levels among twins.…”

Association of VLDLR haplotypes with abdominal fat trait in ducks

“…Several studies have reported that adipose VLDLR gene expression can be regulated by PPARγ (Takazawa et al, 2009;Tao and Hajri, 2011;Gao et al, 2014). All these results suggested that VLDLR is important in regulating fat accumulation (Clemente-Postigo et al, 2011;Go and Mani, 2012;Rankinen et al, 2006).…”

“…Polymorphism-trait association studies cannot determine whether VLDLR is responsible for variation in a trait or whether a closely linked locus influences the trait. Many studies have revealed that obesity candidate genes were associated with genetics, nutritional disease, gastrointestinal and developmental disorders, and cancer (Castro et al, 2017;Ning et al, 2017). Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor alpha (PPARα) and retinoid X receptor alpha (RXRα) were identified as central nodes, also called hub molecules (Kunej et al, 2013).…”

“…Patients with VLDLR mutations have abnormally lower body mass index when compared with control subjects (Boycott et al, 2005;Crawford et al, 2008), which is consistent with the results in mice. Furthermore, previous studies showed that VLDLR is related to body weight and adiposity in humans and mice (Brockmann et al, 1998;Kunej et al, 2013;Clemente-Postigo et al, 2011). Thus, VLDLR expression levels are likely associated with the phenotypic biomarkers for obesity (Kim et al, 2012).…”