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In a study of pregnant women, a team of Deakin scientists has shown in humans for the first time that pregnancy can induce long-term epigenetic changes to human body, with major implications for understanding, preventing and treating disease. Deakin University scientists have discovered that pregnancy can cause long-term changes to the way women’s genes behave, which could affect the health of mother and children.
The findings of a recent study from Deakin’s Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, within the School of Life and Environmental Sciences, showed women experience major molecular changes during pregnancy that could remain with them after their pregnancy has ended. The changes are “epigenetic”-they are not a mutation of the gene’s structure, but a change to how genes behave.
Long-term epigenetic changes can lead to increased risks of disease for the next generation. Studies have previously shown the offspring of women with diabetes have an increased risk of developing obesity, glucose intolerance and type 2 diabetes. Epigenetic markers act like a switch that can alter the activity of genes and cells in the body. All individual cells have the same genetic material, but the behaviour of a gene is different in different tissues of the body. That behaviour can be determined by epigenetic factors, independent of the DNA sequences of the genes.
Epigenetics has implications for understanding, preventing and combatting many diseases, from diabetes to cancer, providing understanding of how adverse environmental factors, including lifestyle, can cause disease. Researchers compared groups of never-pregnant women, pregnant women, and women at 20 weeks postpartum, and made comparisons between the same groups of women at pregnancy, at eight to 10 weeks postpartum, and at 20 weeks postpartum. Similar comparisons were carried out among women with type 2 diabetes.
A significant finding was that women with type 2 diabetes had different epigenetic profiles from non-diabetic women, and their profiles underwent different changes during pregnancy. Pregnancy-induced epigenetic changes could lead to complications among these women with diabetes, such as downstream effects that may contribute to insulin resistance, as well as high risk pregnancy outcomes. Maternal malnutrition and other adverse events in pregnancy can cause problems for the next generation due to epigenetics.
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