Adipokines as an Important Factor Related to the Prenatal Programming of Nutritional Behaviour
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| Year of publication | 2012 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
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| Description | It has been suggested previously that some of the obesity-associated behavioral patterns as well as metabolic pathways are “programmed” during fetal development. The concept of “developmental metabolic programming” is based on the hypothesis that nutritional as well as metabolic status of the mother during the pregnancy affects the metabolism control in the child, thus resulting in a unique phenotype allowing for better adaptation of the infant to the environmental conditions. However, very little is known about factors that are responsible for this programming. The products of the white adipose tissue, so called adipokines, could be elegant candidates for controlling the process of fetal programming as they mostly correlated with the total fat mass and have pleiotropic effects both at parakrine and endocrine levels. It has been reported recently that e.g. leptin, adiponectin, resistin and visfatin as well as numerous other adipokines are associated with specific nutritional or metabolic conditions resulting in a wide range of adaptive phenotypes across the population. Moreover, placenta has been identified as a major source of adipokines, which also lead to the recognition of prenatal period as a highly specific, unique metabolic state resulting in specific feeding and metabolic patterns of the infant. This review covers the major aspects of adipokines in relation to prenatal fetal modelling of the nutritional behaviour. |