Christians Lab
Effects of maternal high-fat diets during pregnancy
Obesity is prevalent among women of child-bearing age throughout the world, and so it is increasingly important to understand the mechanisms by which obesity influences pregnancy and offspring health. We found that a high-fat, high-sucrose diet affects maternal uterine immune cells in mice, with consequences for placental development (Baltayeva et al 2020). Despite the change in immune cell populations, this diet did not exacerbate the effects of an additional inflammatory insult (Virginkar and Christians 2020). Thus our results do not support the hypothesis that an otherwise healthy obese pregnancy can be driven to an adverse outcome by low-level infection. This same diet had sex-specific effects on fetal glucocorticoid levels, potentially by altering the placental barrier to the passage of maternal steroids (Chin et al 2017). Despite the widespread use of such diets to model obese pregnancy, we show that they often do not model key aspects of obese human pregnancies (Christians et al 2019).Relevant papers
Virginkar N, Christians JK (2020) Maternal obesity does not exacerbate the effects of LPS injection on pregnancy outcomes in mice. Biology 9:293.Baltayeva, J, Konwar, C, Castellana, B, Mara, DL, Christians, JK, Beristain, AG (2020) Obesogenic diet exposure alters uterine natural killer cell biology and impairs vasculature remodeling in mice. Biol Reprod 102:63–75.
Christians JK, Lennie KI, Wild LK, Garcha R (2019) Effects of high-fat diets on fetal growth in rodents: a systematic review. Reprod Biol Endocrinol 17:39.
Chin EH, Schmidt KL, Martel KM, Wong CK, Hamden JE, Gibson WT, Soma KK, Christians JK (2017) A maternal high-fat, high-sucrose diet has sex-specific effects on fetal glucocorticoids with little consequence for offspring metabolism and voluntary locomotor activity in mice. PLoS ONE 12:e0174030.