Consumption of choline during pregnancy may boost babies' metabolism

Researchers has found that consuming more foods with choline during pregnancy may boost metabolism and brain development of babies.

Although the role of choline in neurodevelopment has been studied before in rodents, the new research was conducted on pigs, which has more relevance to humans.

A doctoral student in the Neuroscience Program said,"In pigs from choline-deficient moms, their brains were about 10 percent smaller overall."

And 11 of the 19 regions were significantly smaller in choline-deficient brains, he said. The result was the same in grey and white matter concentration of the piglets.

Conversely, piglets whose mothers consumed sufficient choline during pregnancy had higher concentrations of grey and white matter in the brain's cortical regions.

Grey matter is primarily made up of the neurons themselves, while white matter comprises the material that connects neurons and bridges in different parts of the brain.

For the study, the team gave pregnant sows choline-deficient or choline-sufficient diets through the second half of their pregnancies.

After weaning, piglets were fed choline-deficient or choline-sufficient milk replacer for 30 days. Then the month-old piglets were scanned by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

The left and right cortex were found to be larger in the choline-sufficient pigs, as a result of the a greater density of grey matter in the brain.

As part of the study, some of the pigs from choline-deficient mothers were also given adequate amounts of choline after birth.

The results showed that it is not sufficient for the brain.

"Postnatal supplementation cannot correct for prenatal deficiency. It has to occur during development," explained the associate professor at the varsity.

"We know that the structural alteration is there, but it may not manifest in ways we can see until later in life. That's why it's important to think about this during gestation because the changes are occurring then," the Dr. noted.

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MUSIC AND BRAIN CONNECTIVITY- WHAT IS THE RELATION?

The very few people who do not like music at all may have reduced brain connectivity between two regions of the brain linked to sound processing and reward. The findings showed that people who lacked joy from music — a condition described as specific musical anhedonia — had reduced functional connectivity between cortical brain regions responsible for processing sound and subcortical regions related to reward. The inability to experience pleasure from music affects three-to-five per cent of the world’s population, the study said.

For the study, the team led by researchers at McGill University in Quebec, Canada, recruited 45 healthy participants who listened to musical excerpts inside an fMRI machine while providing pleasure ratings in real-time. To control their brain’s response to other reward types, the participants also played a monetary gambling task in which they could win or lose real money.

The results revealed that while listening to music, people with the specific musical anhedonics did show reduced functional connectivity between cortical regions associated with auditory processing and the activity of the nucleus accumbens — a key subcortical structure of the reward network. In contrast, individuals with high sensitivity to music showed enhanced connectivity.

Moreover, when the participants won money in the gambling task, their nucleus accumbens showed increased activity. The fact that subjects could be insensible to music while still being responsive to another stimulus like money suggests different pathways to reward for different stimuli. This finding may pave the way for the detailed study of the neural substrates underlying other domain-specific anhedonias and, from an evolutionary perspective, help us to understand how music acquired reward value.

“These findings not only help us to understand individual variability in the way the reward system functions, but also can be applied to the development of therapies for treatment of reward-related disorders, including apathy, depression, and addiction,” said Robert Zatorre, neuroscientist at McGill University, Quebec. The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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