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Clore Laboratory: News
Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolic Research
2 March 2005 – Claire Stocker gives invited lecture on developmental origins of obesity at Asia-Oceania conference in Taiwan
Claire Stocker, a postdoctoral fellow at the Clore Laboratory, University of Buckingham, UK, gave one of four plenary lectures at the 3rd Asia-Oceania Conference on Obesity, held in Taipei, Taiwan, on 25–28 February 2005.
The conference was organised under the auspices of the Asia-Oceania region of the International Association for the Study of Obesity and was opened by Ms Lu Hsiu-Lien, Vice President of Taiwan. The meeting focused on Obesity and the Metabolic Syndrome: New Frontiers of Treatment. Claire’s plenary lecture, entitled ‘Predisposition to obesity and the metabolic syndrome: developmental origins and possible protective mechanisms’, discussed the role of early nutrition, both in utero and postnatally, on metabolic programming. Poor early nutrition leading to small for gestational age offspring is believed to be associated with metabolic programming to cope with relatively poor nutrition and a need to have a thrifty metabolism throughout life. However, such programming in the presence of nutritional plenty such as Western type high fat food leads to obesity and the metabolic syndrome.
Claire then presented her own work showing that treatment with the hormone leptin during pregnancy and lactation was able to reverse the programming induced by inadequate nutrition and that the resultant offspring were able to resist high fat diet induced obesity and insulin resistance.