Antenatal Corticosteroids: A Risk Factor for the Development of Chronic Disease
Open Access
- 5 March 2012
- journal article
- review article
- Published by Hindawi Limited in Journal of Nutrition and Metabolism
- Vol. 2012, 1-9
- https://doi.org/10.1155/2012/930591
Abstract
Preterm birth remains a major health issue worldwide. Since the 1990s, women at risk for preterm birth received a single course of exogenous antenatal corticosteroids (ACSs) to facilitate fetal lung maturity. More recently, repeated or multiple courses of ACS have been supported to provide continued fetal maturity support for women with continued risk of preterm birth. However, exogenous ACS reduces birth weight which, in turn, is associated with adverse adult outcomes such as coronary heart disease, stroke, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes. The long-term effects of ACS exposure on HPA axis activity and neurological function are well documented in animal studies, and it appears that ACS, regardless of dose exposure, is capable of affecting fetal HPA axis development causing permanent changes in the HPA axis that persists through life and is manifested by chronic illness and behavioral changes. The challenge in human studies is to demonstrate whether an intervention such as ACS administration in pregnancy contributes to developmental programming and how this is manifested in later life.Keywords
This publication has 106 references indexed in Scilit:
- Developmental Origins of Health and Disease: Brief History of the Approach and Current Focus on Epigenetic MechanismsSeminars in Reproductive Medicine, 2009
- Epigenetic regulation of the glucocorticoid receptor in human brain associates with childhood abuseNature Neuroscience, 2009
- Effects of repeated prenatal glucocorticoid exposure on long‐term potentiation in the juvenile guinea‐pig hippocampusThe Journal of Physiology, 2007
- Epigenetic regulation of transcription: a mechanism for inducing variations in phenotype (fetal programming) by differences in nutrition during early life?British Journal of Nutrition, 2007
- Prenatal dexamethasone exposure induces changes in nonhuman primate offspring cardiometabolic and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis functionJCI Insight, 2007
- Induction of altered epigenetic regulation of the hepatic glucocorticoid receptor in the offspring of rats fed a protein-restricted diet during pregnancy suggests that reduced DNA methyltransferase-1 expression is involved in impaired DNA methylation and changes in histone modificationsBritish Journal of Nutrition, 2007
- Dietary protein restriction of pregnant rats in the F0 generation induces altered methylation of hepatic gene promoters in the adult male offspring in the F1 and F2 generationsBritish Journal of Nutrition, 2007
- Hypomethylation of MB-COMT promoter is a major risk factor for schizophrenia and bipolar disorderHuman Molecular Genetics, 2006
- Genomic DNA methylation: the mark and its mediatorsTrends in Biochemical Sciences, 2006
- Epigenetic programming by maternal behaviorNature Neuroscience, 2004