Abstract
Maternal stress, such as maternal obesity, can induce severe gestational disease and hormonal disorder which may disrupt fetal organ maturation and further cause endangered early or future health in offspring. During fetal development, glucocorticoids are essential for the maturation of organ systems. For instance, in clinical applications, glucocorticoids are commonly utilized to pregnant women with the risk of preterm delivery to reduce mortality of the newborns. However, exposure of excessive glucocorticoids at embryonic and fetal developmental stages can cause diseases such as cardiovascular disease and muscle atrophy in adulthood. Effects of excessive glucocorticoids on human health are well-recognized and extensively studied. Nonetheless, effects of these hormones on farm animal growth and development, particularly on prenatal muscle development, and postnatal growth, did not attract much attention until the last decade. Here, we provided a short review of the recent progress relating to the effect of glucocorticoids on prenatal skeletal muscle development and postnatal muscle growth as well as heart muscle development and cardiovascular disease during life course.
Highlights
Life events are critical to growth performance and health throughout the life course of an animal including human beings
Unfavorable maternal environmental changes are associated with many types of abnormalities including cardiovascular disease, obesity, insulin resistance, and metabolic syndrome in offspring later life, which is known as the disease origins of adult disease or developmental programming (Barker et al, 1993; Friedrich, 2002; Boney et al, 2005)
We mainly focused on discussing effects of glucocorticoids on striated muscle development and function including skeletal muscle and cardiac muscle
Summary
Life events are critical to growth performance and health throughout the life course of an animal including human beings. A myriad of studies demonstrated that excessive endogenous glucocorticoids resulting from maternal stress or exogenous glucocorticoids due to antenatal treatment to reduce preterm delivery in pregnancy result in reduced birth weight, fetal growth restriction and adverse effects in adult life such as heart disease, metabolic syndrome, hypertension, and diabetes mellitus (Asztalos, 2012; Carson et al, 2016; Kemp et al, 2016; Agnew et al, 2018) In this short review, we mainly focused on discussing effects of glucocorticoids on striated muscle development and function including skeletal muscle and cardiac muscle. We summarized the mechanism of glucocorticoids in the regulation of muscle reprogramming and provided some perspectives on future directions
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