Why do so many ladies have difficulty making enough milk to bréastfeed when they give birth? A new study by scientists at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Centre and the University of California Davis adds to their previous research implicating insulin’s role in lactation success.
The study is the first to describe how ladies b**bs becomes highly sensitive to:
Insulin during lactation. It is also the first study to get an accurate picture of how specific genes are switched on in the human mammary gland during lactation.The researchers used next generation sequencing technology, RNA sequencing, to reveal “in exquisite detail” the blueprint for making milk in the human mammary gland, according to Laurie Nommsen-Rivers, PhD, RD, IBCLC, a scientist at Cincinnati Children’s and corresponding author of the study, published online in PLOS ONE, a journal of the Public Library of Science. Nommsen-Rivers’ previous research had shown that for mothers with markers of sub-optimal glucose metabolism, such as being overweight, being at an advanced maternal age, or having a large birth-weight baby, it takes longer for their milk to come in, suggesting a role for insulin in the mammary gland. The new research shows how the mammary gland becomes sensitive to insulin during lactation.
For a long time, insulin was not thought to play a direct role in regulating the milk-making cells of the human bréast, because insulin is not needed for these cells to take in sugars, such as glucose. Scientists now, however, appreciate that insulin does more than facilitate uptake of sugars.
“This new study shows a dramatic switching-on of the insulin receptor and its downstream signals during the bréast’s transition to a bio factory that manufactures massive amounts of proteins, fats and carbohydrates for nourishing the newborn baby,” says Dr. Nommsen-Rivers.
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