Women with PCOS give birth to sons more likely to become obese: study

By Pol Allingham via SWNS

Boys are two times more likely to become obese if their mom suffered from polycystic ovaries, according to a new study.

They also have a greater risk of developing type 2 diabetes, researchers found.

Until now, scientists did not know that health issues linked to PCOS were passed on to the male side of the family.

When it came to the male lineage, scientists at Karolinska Institutet (KI), Sweden discovered that the physiological legacy of PCOS stuck around for three generations.

About 15 percent of people of childbearing age worldwide are affected by the disorder that makes it challenging to get pregnant and is caused by ovaries producing too much of the sex hormone testosterone.

It’s linked with health issues including diabetes, obesity and mental illness. Daughters of those with PCOS are five times more likely to develop it.

Professor Elisabet Stener-Victorin, KI Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, said: “We discovered that sons of women with PCOS have a twofold risk of obesity and of having high levels of 'bad' cholesterol, which increases the risk of developing insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes later in life.”

Researchers studied the Swedish registry and found 9,000 out of the 460,000 sons born in Sweden between July 2006 and December 2015 had mothers with PCOS.

The team also conducted a mouse study mimicking the pregnancy of obese and people of normal weight with PCOS.

They examined the male mice born to females who were fed either a standard diet or diet rich in fat and sugar.

The sons were exposed to high levels of the male sex hormone dihydrotestosterone during pregnancy, mimicking the testosterone in PCOS.

The children were then fed a standard diet until adulthood at which point their fat distribution and metabolism were examined.

To test how far the physiological characteristics of PCOS traveled down the genetic line, the first-generation offspring were mated with healthy female mice not exposed to male sex hormones or a diet rich in fat and sugar.

This was repeated in the second generation. The original simulated PCOS only stopped having an effect in the third generation.

Stener-Victorin said: “We could see that these male mice had more fat tissue, larger fat cells, and a disordered basal metabolism, despite eating a healthy diet.

“These findings are important because they highlight the risk of passing health problems down through the male side of a family, highlight the risk of passing this kind of health problem, and they may help us in the future to find ways to identify, treat and prevent reproductive and metabolic diseases at an early stage.”

Associate Professor Qiaolin Deng, involved in the study published in Cell Reports Medicine and from the same KI department, summarized how future generations would be affected.

She said: “Through these experiments, we can show that obesity and high levels of male hormones in the woman during pregnancy can cause long-term health problems in the male offspring.

"Their fat tissue function, metabolism, and reproductive function deteriorate, which in turn affects future generations.”