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Hospitalized preterm infants experience painful medical procedures. Oral sucrose is the nonpharmacological standard of care for minor procedural pain relief. Infants are treated with numerous doses of sucrose, raising concerns about potential long-term effects. The objective of this study was to determine the long-term effects of neonatal oral sucrose treatment on growth and liver metabolism in a mouse model. Neonatal female and male mice were randomly assigned to one of two oral treatments ( n = 7–10 mice/group/sex): sterile water or sucrose. Pups were treated 10 times/day for the first 6 days of life with 0.2 mg/g body wt of respective treatments (24% solution; 1–4 μL/dose) to mimic what is given to preterm infants. Mice were weaned at age 3 wk onto a control diet and fed until age 16 wk. Sucrose-treated female and male mice gained less weight during the treatment period and were smaller at weaning than water-treated mice ( P ≤ 0.05); no effect of sucrose treatment on body weight was observed at adulthood. However, adult sucrose-treated female mice had smaller tibias and lower serum insulin-like growth factor-1 than adult water-treated female mice ( P ≤ 0.05); these effects were not observed in males. Lower liver S-adenosylmethionine, phosphocholine, and glycerophosphocholine were observed in adult sucrose-treated compared with water-treated female and male mice ( P ≤ 0.05). Sucrose-treated female, but not male, mice had lower liver free choline and higher liver betaine compared with water-treated female mice ( P < 0.01). Our findings suggest that repeated neonatal sucrose treatment has long-term sex-specific effects on growth and liver methionine and choline metabolism.

OBJECTIVES: Gestational diabetes (GDM) is associated with adverse outcomes in both mother and child. Women with diabetes and obesity (BMI ≥ 30kg/m(2)) are recommended to take more folic acid than recommended for healthy women, to prevent birth defects. However, little is known about the effects of high folic acid supplementation in GDM. The objective of this study was to determine if folic acid supplementation in a mouse model of GDM affects maternal and fetal metabolic health. METHODS: Female (C57BL/6J) mice were fed from weaning a control diet (10% kcal fat; control dams) or western diet (45% kcal fat; western dams; model of GDM) with (10mg/kg diet) or without (2mg/kg diet) supplemental folic acid (SFA). Dams were fed for 13 weeks prior to breeding. Physiological assessments of glucose homeostasis were conducted before breeding. Tissues were collected at gestational day 18.5 RESULTS: Western dams had greater adiposity (p

A lack of comparative data across laboratories is often a barrier to the uptake and adoption of new technologies. Furthermore, data generated by different immunoassay methods may be incomparable due to a lack of harmonization. In this multicenter study, we describe validation experiments conducted in a single lab and cross-lab comparisons of assay results to assess the performance characteristics of the Q-plex™ 7-plex Human Micronutrient Array (7-plex), an immunoassay that simultaneously quantifies seven biomarkers associated with micronutrient (MN) deficiencies, inflammation and malarial antigenemia using plasma or serum; alpha-1-acid glycoprotein, C-reactive protein, ferritin, histidine-rich protein 2, retinol binding protein 4, soluble transferrin receptor, and thyroglobulin. Validations included repeated testing (n = 20 separately prepared experiments on 10 assay plates) in a single lab to assess precision and linearity. Seven independent laboratories tested 76 identical heparin plasma samples collected from a cohort of pregnant women in Niger using the same 7-plex assay to assess differences in results across laboratories. In the analytical validation experiments, intra- and inter-assay coefficients of variation were acceptable at

Premature infants ( Disclosure C.Y. Ramirez Contreras: None. E. Mussai: None. A.M. Wiedeman: None. A. Mehran: None. M. Salehzadeh: None. N. Boonpattrawong: None. M. Ranger: None. K.K. Soma: None. L. Holsti: Other Relationship; Self; Provincial Health Services Association. A.M. Devlin: None. Funding British Columbia Children's Hospital Research Institute