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Fertility researchers gather for Grand Rapids conference
– Reported August 09, 2014
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WZZM) — More than 800 researchers from 36 countries are spending a week in Grand Rapids, sharing their research on fertility.
Austrailian researcher Rebecca Robker’s groundbreaking work shows how being overweight affects fertility.
“What we know is that a little bit of fat is absolutely essential for fertility,” Robker says. “But as women become more obese, they have problems with their fertility. The egg is less likely to be released from their ovary, so they are less likely to conceive, but even when they do conceive, what we’re finding in our animal studies is that the embryos that develop from those eggs from those obese animals develop slightly differently and seem to have a different metabolic profile.”
A mother’s obesity also has effects on her children.
“Clinically-obese women are likely to have some complications during pregnancy, and their babies are more likely to become obese,” Robker explained. “So we’re looking in animal models — in mice — for the reasons why that might happen and finding that events even in the egg and in the early days of embryo development may be responsible for the long-term effects that we’re seeing in humans, in women.”
Experts are studying whether medications might help reverse obesity’s effects on fertility, according to Robker.
“We are looking at that, because we want to understand the cellular pathways in the egg and in the embryo that are responsible for these health consequences. So we have been looking at drugs that target those cellular pathways to give us an idea of how the developmental problems are established. We have identified a couple of drugs that can reverse this lipid-induced stress, this fat-induced stress in the egg.”
Those drugs are promising, she says.
“They are very promising, because some are in clinical trials for other indications, so they are very promising. But really we are using those as a tool to help us understand why this happens, to give more of an evidence base to why it’s important to have a healthy body weight, even prior to conception.”
