Abstract
Obesity is a multifactorial disease, involving complexes interactions between genetic and environmental factors. However, the increased incidence, early onset and severity of this disease are still not well understood. Several findings have demonstrated that in utero stressors (such as gestational diabetes, deficient nutritional status, cigarette smoking compounds, etc) can promote epigenetic and transcriptional changes, besides affecting mitochondrial metabolism, modulate fetal development and predispose to later development of diseases, including obesity and other metabolic syndrome components. Therefore, this study aims to identify, in cells of the placenta (fetal and maternal sides) and umbilical cord blood of newborns from mothers with gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) if certain genetic events (expression of genes related to mitochondrial metabolism - MnSOD, PPARalpha and PPARGC1-beta), epigenetic event (methylation gene) and protein changes are related to a higher risk for developing obesity in adulthood. For this, the study will include pregnant women with GDM (Group 1, n = 15) and their respective newborns (Group 2, n = 15), and healthy pregnant women (Group 3, n = 15) and their newborns (Group 4, n = 15). Additionally, adult obese (Group 5, n = 15) and eutrophic (Group 6, n = 15) subjects will be included as reference populations. It is expected the results may contribute for elucidating the molecular changes induced by gestational diabetes, in order to establish strategies for preventing or reducing future risk for obesity.
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