# Effects of Maternal Diabetes on early brain development

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA · 2024 · $668,259

## Abstract

Project Summary
One in every five youth are living with obesity, placing them at increased risk for developing diabetes and
cardiovascular disease. Identifying risk factors contributing to obesity is extremely critical so that prevention
strategies can be taken early to mitigate the obesity risk. Maternal diabetes in pregnancy is a strong risk factor
for offspring obesity. Multimodal neuroimaging has the potential to reveal important mechanistic insights into
the link between prenatal exposure to maternal diabetes and offspring obesity, but most existing studies
possess major flaws including: 1) cross-sectional design evaluating later developmental periods,
introducing uncertainty around the influence of other perinatal exposures; 2) poor accounting for the effects of
maternal obesity; 3) low statistical power and overly homogeneous populations; and 4) use of a single
imaging modality, limiting our ability to understand the complexity and full scale of brain abnormality
associated with exposure to maternal diabetes.
 By integrating noninvasive structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) with developmental
neuroscience techniques and targeting the critical period of development, the first 1000 days of life, we aim to
test the hypothesis that prenatal exposure to maternal diabetes will be independently associated with
altered brain development during very early childhood, and that maternal obesity will further
exacerbate these effects. We further hypothesize that these brain alterations will contribute to a higher
risk of obesity early in life. To explore this hypothesis, the applicant, and her team plan to leverage
longitudinal brain and body weight and length data during the first ~1000 days of life from 8 existing cohorts
that participated in NIH-funded The Organization for Imaging Genomics in Infancy (ORIGINs) consortium, part
of the Enhancing Neuroimaging Genetics through Meta-analysis (ENIGMA). We aim to examine effects of
maternal diabetes exposure either separately or together with maternal obesity on brain metrics at birth (Aim 1)
and brain developmental trajectories from birth to 2-3 years of age (Aim 2). Furthermore, we will discriminate
exposed vs. un-exposed offspring (Aim 3) with replication by using innovative machine learning algorithms and
identify multi-modal imaging markers that predict obesity by age 2-3.
 This will be the largest and most highly powered neuroimaging study to identify robust multi-modal brain
signatures of prenatal exposure to maternal diabetes, thereby enhancing our understanding of
etiologic/causal pathways of obesity development.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10776641
- **Project number:** 1R01DK137899-01
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
- **Principal Investigator:** Shan Luo
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $668,259
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2024-03-15 → 2029-02-28

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10776641

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10776641, Effects of Maternal Diabetes on early brain development (1R01DK137899-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10776641. Licensed CC0.

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