Maternal Obesity, Breast Milk Composition, and Infant Growth

Study Summary

Today the majority of pregnant women in the United States are either overweight or obese at conception with their offspring having greater adiposity at birth, a 2-fold greater risk of later obesity, and neonatal insulin resistance. It was long thought that breast milk composition was fairly uniform among women, having been optimized through evolutionary time to provide adequate sole nutrition for the growing infant regardless of the environmental circumstances. However, recent evidence shows that breast milk is a highly complex fluid with significant inter-individual variation in hormonal and cytokine concentrations, human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) and other features. Pervasive maternal obesity and gestational diabetes are evolutionarily novel conditions for the human species but little effort has yet been made to systematically examine how they are associated with breast milk adipose-tissue derived hormone and cytokine (adipocytokine) variation, HMOs, or other features, or whether that variation relates to infant metabolic status. The objective of this study is to comprehensively assess the "lactational programming" hypothesis, that is, whether or not recently documented variation in breast-milk composition is related to both maternal and infant metabolic status. The central hypothesis is that a graded, dose-response relationship between maternal adiposity and GDM exists with adipocytokine concentrations, HMOs, and other features in breast milk and that the milk concentrations of these features are associated with altered body composition in their exclusively breast-fed offspring. The results of the study will be used to design interventions to reduce maternal weight during pregnancy and lactation and to augment lactation education materials to focus on the needs of breastfeeding women with obesity and GDM.

Conditions Studied

Study Locations (2)