Research briefPreconceptional fasting of fathers alters serum glucose in offspring of mice
Section snippets
Materials and methods
To examine effects of paternal food deprivation on offspring, male NIH NCr outbred Swiss mice (8 wk old) were subjected to 24-h fasts with free access to water. To minimize the effect of coincident variables, untreated controls were maintained in close parallel, including initial randomization into groups, side-by-side housing, killed at the same times, and concurrent sample analysis. All mice were fed a standard NIH-31 modified block diet (Purina Co., St. Louis, MO, USA) and were killed in a
Results
Fasting of male mice, of the same ages as those used for breeding, for 24 h resulted in an average 47% decrease in serum glucose and an average 10.5-fold increase in serum corticosterone (data not shown). Breeding performance was not affected. For both male and female offspring of the fathers that were fasted once, there were highly significant decreases in average serum glucose levels compared with those in controls at 10 wk of age (Table 1). In male offspring of the fasted fathers, there was
Discussion
The firmest, most convincing result of this study was decreased serum glucose in the 10-wk-old male offspring of the fasted fathers. This was seen, with a high degree of significance by conservative statistical testing, in these male offspring in both studies. Control glucose values for the males of this age were very similar for both studies. This appears to be a solid result. It is a remarkable finding considering the close regulation of serum glucose characteristic of animals. Although the
Acknowledgments
The authors express appreciation to Rick Klabansky for data entry and to Yih-Horng Shiao and David Berrigan for critical reading of the manuscript and useful suggestions.
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