Study shows parental exercise improves glucose metabolism throughout the offspring's body

Study shows parental exercise improves glucose metabolism throughout the offspring's body

A mouse study by Kristin Stanford, a physiology and cell biology researcher at The Ohio State University College of Medicine at Wexner Medical Center, offers new opportunities to determine how maternal and paternal exercise improves the metabolic health of offspring.

Laurie Goodyear of the Joslin Diabetes Center and Harvard Medical School co-led the study, which was published online in the journal Diabetes.

This study used mice to examine how their lifestyle - high-fat food compared to healthy food and exercise compared to unhealthy food - affected the metabolic products of their offspring.

Metabolites are substances created or used when the body breaks down food, drugs or chemicals or its own fat or muscle tissue. This process, called metabolism, produces energy and the materials necessary for growth, reproduction and maintenance of health. Metabolites can serve as disease markers, particularly for type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

Tissue metabolites contribute to overall metabolism, including glucose or fatty acid metabolism, and thus to systemic metabolism. We have previously shown that maternal and paternal exercise improve offspring health. Tissue and serum metabolites play a fundamental role in the health of an organism, but how parental exercise affects offspring tissue and serum metabolites has not yet been studied. These new data contribute to how maternal or paternal exercise could improve offspring metabolism.”

Kristin Stanford, physiology and cell biology researcher, Ohio State University College of Medicine

Other studies have linked the development of type 2 diabetes and impaired metabolic health to parents' poor diet. In this study, researchers examined the positive effects of parental exercise training with high-fat feeding on the metabolic health of offspring.

They used targeted metabolomics – the study of metabolites – to determine the influence of maternal and paternal exercise, as well as the combination of maternal and paternal exercise, on the metabolite profile in the offspring's liver, skeletal muscle and blood serum levels.

"We have long been interested in the role that parental exercise plays in improving the metabolic health of offspring. These data are a next step in learning mechanisms of how this works," said Stanford, a member of the Ohio State University Dorothy M. Davis Heart and Lung Research Institute and the Diabetes and Metabolism Research Center.

This study found that all forms of parental exercise improved offspring's overall glucose metabolism in adulthood, and metabolomics profiling of offspring serum, muscle, and liver showed that parental exercise has widespread effects on all classes of metabolites in all tissues of these offspring.

"Any insight into how these tissue metabolites might be regulated could help us understand how tissue metabolism works and provide some ideas to promote or improve tissue glucose or fatty acid metabolism. This could ultimately lead to the development of new therapeutic tools or targets to improve metabolism." said Goodyear.

Future studies will clarify the specific role of exercise in mediating these metabolites and determine their role in improving offspring health, particularly in muscle and liver.

Source:

The Ohio State University College of Medicine

Reference:

Hernández-Saavedra, D., et al. (2022) Maternal and paternal exercise induce different metabolite signatures in offspring tissues. Diabetes. doi.org/10.2337/db22-0341.

.