Maternal Overnutrition Programs Central Inflammation and Addiction-Like Behavior in Offspring

Figure 1

Maternal programming by hypercaloric diets increases the development of addictive behavior in offspring. (a) Hypercaloric diet intake or obesity during pregnancy leads to activation of an inflammatory state of mothers (F0), favoring aversive intrauterine environment and selective increase in proinflammatory markers. (b) Positive inflammatory state in mothers correlates with the one in the offspring (F1) and also with activation of fetal epigenetic program including DNA methylation, histone modification (ip acetylation, methylation, sumoylation, and ubiquitination), and noncoding RNAs (ip miRNA, piRNA, and lncRNA), which are capable of altering gene expression profile in selective regions belonging to the reward system: prefrontal cortex (PFC), nucleus accumbens (NAc), and ventral tegmental area (VTA). (c) Epigenetic programming associates with neurodevelopment alterations in F1 including synaptic signaling, synaptic plasticity, and neurogenesis which contributes to addictive-like behavior.