Maternal Sucrose Intake during Pregnancy Alone Disrupts Testosterone and Allopregnanolone Levels in the Fetal Brain of Rats
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Intake of added sugars, such as sucrose, is high globally. In rats, a maternal high-sucrose diet (HSD) from 10 wk before pregnancy to embryonic day (E)19.5 has widespread impacts on maternal, placental, and fetal blood and brain steroid levels, including glucocorticoids, androgens, and aldosterone. OBJECTIVES: This study examined whether maternal HSD during pregnancy alone is sufficient to alter maternal, placental, and fetal steroids. METHODS: Pregnant rats received either a control diet (1% kcal sucrose) or an isocaloric, nutrient-matched HSD (26% kcal sucrose) between E0.5 and 19.5. On E19.5, we collected maternal serum, placenta, fetal blood and brain, and amniotic fluid. We microdissected the placenta and fetal brain and measured 14 steroids using liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (n = 12-15/diet/sex). RESULTS: Maternal HSD during pregnancy alone did not alter maternal food intake, maternal body mass, and litter size (all P values ≥ 0.29, Student's t-test) but increased the percentage of males in a litter (P = 0.03, Student's t-test). Maternal HSD did not alter steroids in the maternal serum (all P values ≥ 0.21, Student's t-test), placenta [all P values ≥ 0.07, 2-way analysis of variance (ANOVA)], and fetal blood (all P values ≥ 0.13, 2-way ANOVA). Nonetheless, maternal HSD increased testosterone in the fetal nucleus accumbens (P = 0.04, 2-way ANOVA), decreased allopregnanolone in the fetal amygdala (P = 0.01, 2-way ANOVA), and decreased 11-dehydrocorticosterone in the amniotic fluid (P = 0.05, 2-way ANOVA). CONCLUSIONS: Maternal HSD during pregnancy alone does not affect steroid levels in the maternal serum, placenta, or fetal blood of rats, but disrupts testosterone and allopregnanolone levels in critical regions of the fetal brain that regulate reward-seeking and emotion. Thus, although a long-term maternal HSD is necessary for widespread endocrine effects, the fetal brain is sensitive to short-term increases in maternal sucrose consumption during pregnancy.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".