Feeding a Maternal Diet Enriched in Docosahexaenoic Acid to Lactating Dams Improves the Ex Vivo Tolerance Response to Egg Protein in Suckled Pups
Bibliographic record
Abstract
An important T cell mediated process that occurs early in life is the development of oral tolerance (OT). Food allergies are believed to be the result of a failure to develop OT to a dietary antigen. The objective of this study was to determine the effect of feeding a maternal diet supplemented with docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) while containing adequate amounts of arachidonic acid (AA) during the suckling period on the development of the immune system and OT in offspring. Sprague‐Dawley dams were randomized to one of the two nutritionally adequate experimental diets 24–48h prior to parturition: control diet (N=12, 0.4% AA and 0% DHA of total fatty acids) or high DHA diet (N=8, 0.4% AA and 0.9% DHA of total fatty acids). Diets were fed to dams ad libitum throughout the suckling period (21 days) and matched for macronutrient, micronutrient and fatty acid content differing only in the composition of omega‐3. At 14‐days pups from each dam were randomly assigned to a mucosal OT challenge for 5 days: placebo (sucrose) or ovalbumin (OVA). At 3 weeks, pups were euthanized and immune cell phenotypes and cytokine production by mitogen‐ (Concanavalin A (ConA), lipopolysaccharide (LPS)) or OVA‐stimulated splenocytes were measured by direct immunofluorescence assay and ELISA, respectively. Feeding dams a high DHA diet increased the proportion of DHA and AA found in breast milk vs. the control diet (both P <0.01). Regardless of the OT challenge, feeding a high DHA diet led to a higher production of interferon‐γ by splenocytes stimulated with ConA and a higher production of interleukin (IL)‐6, IL‐10 and tumor necrosis factor‐α after LPS stimulation (all P <0.05). OVA‐stimulated splenocytes from suckled pups fed the high DHA diet produced significantly more IL‐10 and less transforming growth factor‐β compared to the control diet (both P <0.02), suggestive of better OT. The OT challenge with OVA resulted in a lower production of IL‐6 by LPS‐stimulated splenocytes and led to a higher proportion of cytotoxic T cells expressing CD28 and total cells expressing CD27 (all P <0.02) compared to non‐tolerized pups. Our results suggest that feeding a maternal diet enriched in DHA during the suckling period improves the ability of splenocytes to respond ex vivo to mitogens and the tolerance response to a dietary antigen. Irrespective of the suckling diet, pups who had been orally tolerized to OVA had a lower response to a bacterial antigen despite the presence of more activated T cells and memory immune cells. Support or Funding Information Supported from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. CR holds a scholarship from Canadian Institutes for Health Research and Fonds de recherche en santé du Québec.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".