Abstract
Maternal health and nutritional status before and during gestation may affect neonates' immune system and energy balance as they develop. The objective of this study was to associate certain clinical markers of maternal adiposity (body mass index and gestational weight gain) and neonatal adiposity (birth weight, abdominal circumference, and waist/height index) with the levels of pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines in umbilical cord blood at birth: IL-1β, IL-1Rα, IL-4, IL-6, IL-10, IFN-γ, and TNF-α. An exploratory cross-sectional study was conducted with a convenience sample of women from one hospital recruited shortly before giving birth through scheduled cesarean section. Of 31 the pregnant women who agreed to participate and met the inclusion criteria, twenty-nine newborns from these women were analyzed. Three cases of tobacco smoking during pregnancy were identified as an unexpected maternal risk factor and were included in the analysis. Typical of the population treated at this hospital, ten of our participants had diabetes during pregnancy, and nine of them had a pre-pregnancy BMI> 25. Non-parametric statistical analyses and a generalized linear model with gamma scale response with a log link were performed. Results: Correlation analyses, differences in medians, and a prediction model all showed positive and significant results between cytokine levels in cord blood and neonatal abdominal circumference, birth weight, and waist-height index. For maternal variables, smoking during pregnancy showed significant associations with cytokine levels in cord blood. Conclusion: This study found a variety of associations suggesting that increased neonatal adiposity increases pro-inflammatory cytokine levels at birth.
Highlights
Cytokines can act as hormones in the immune system and are generally influenced by nutritional status in the same way that other physiological systems would be [1].Neonatal cytokines levels may be good indicators of future health status
This article reports the analysis of an exploratory study conducted with twenty-nine mother/child binomials on the associations between pre-pregnancy body mass index (P-BMI), gestational weight gain GWG), neonatal abdominal circumference (AC), waist/height index, and weight at birth on the levels of seven cytokines in the umbilical cord blood at birth. Information on another risk factor—exposure to tobacco smoking—was gathered and associated with the same cytokines. In this exploratory cross-sectional study, we examined possible associations between neonatal cytokines and maternal and neonatal adiposity clinical markers that may influence fetal development
Differences in somatometry at birth between the P-BMI and maternal diabetes groups were evaluated with the Kruskal-Wallis test
Summary
Cytokines can act as hormones in the immune system and are generally influenced by nutritional status in the same way that other physiological systems would be [1]. Neonatal cytokines levels may be good indicators of future health status. Maternal nutritional status is one of the most dominant contributors to a fetal environment that potentially modifies a newborn’s physiology [2,3,4]. Obesity is associated with a metainflammatory state characterized by increased cytokines from adipose tissue [5]. Obese mothers tend to have increased levels of pro-inflammatory (IL-6, TNF-α, IL-8, IL-1β) and counterregulatory (IL-1Rα) cytokines in maternal serum than healthy weight women [6,7,8]
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