The researchers from Auckland University in New Zealand, suggest that daughters experience puberty earlier if their mothers have a high fat diet while pregnant.
Experts suspect that the early onset of puberty may be linked to a range of problems from obesity, to depression in teenage years along with a higher risk of breast cancer as they have more menstrual cycles.
Although the research was carried out on rats, the research team believe the findings have relevance for women.
Dr. Deborah Sloboda, the lead author of the study, from the Liggins Institute at Auckland University, says the onset of puberty was much earlier in all the rats whose mothers had a high-fat diet, compared with the offspring of rats that ate a regular diet.
Then later in life those rats also had a higher amount of body fat than the controls did, even if they ate a regular diet while young.
The study showed that among the adult rats that had a maternal high-fat diet, there were alterations in the sex hormones, including increased levels of the ovarian hormone progesterone in females.
Dr. Sloboda says research suggests that a combination of prenatal and postnatal influences in girls can affect the onset of menstruation and a maternal high-fat diet possibly influences reproductive maturation and reproductive capacity in adult offspring.
The research was presented at The Endocrine Society's 90th Annual Meeting in San Francisco and was supported by the Health Research Council of New Zealand, National Research Centre for Growth and Development, and the Maurice and Phyllis Paykel Trust.
The team subsequently identified the crucial importance of assessing both the level of blood and lymph vessel invasion by cancer cells at the earliest stages of detection. It has, until recently, been very difficult to distinguish between the two. With advances in immunohistochemical techniques, blood vessels can today be reliably identified and differentiated from lymphatics. Currently clinical approaches for the assessment of vascular invasion are insufficiently robust and can result in a failure to detect some lesions accurately, or fail to differentiate adequately between blood and lymph vessels. The Nottingham team has shown - using tumour sections from 177 patients - that 96 per cent of vascular invasion in primary invasive breast cancer is predominantly of the lymph vessels. This is significant.
It is important that this finding is verified in a larger cohort of patients. The researchers are now working to accomplish this, through funding recently obtained from Cancer Research UK, using specimens from more than a thousand women with early stage breast cancer. Results from this study will also allow them to determine whether Lymphatic Vascular Invasion can be incorporated into an improved prognostic index for early stage breast cancer.
This work is being combined with gene expression studies, with bioinformatic approaches and using in vitro (cells in culture) models to identify novel therapeutic targets. It is being conducted in collaboration with a number of groups, industrial and academic, from both the UK and overseas.
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