Location: Nutrition, Food Safety/Quality
Project Number: 0500-00117-001-004-A
Project Type: Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Sep 15, 2025
End Date: Sep 14, 2026
Objective:
Peanuts provide a good source of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, fibers, polyunsaturated fats, and plant-based protein, and consumption of food containing peanuts may improve mental health and benefit cognition. Meanwhile, human brain develops rapidly in utero and during the early postnatal period and is known to be impacted by diet and nutrition of both the pregnant women and the children. While it is reasonably speculated that peanut consumption during this critical period will be beneficial for early brain development, it is unclear how and to what degree it can impact the developing brain, partly due to lack of sensitive and objective measures of brain development at the youngest ages. At Arkansas Children’s Research Institute (ACRI), the cooperator has an ongoing clinical study (Maternal Obesity and Offspring Neurodevelopment, the MOON study) in which the research team collected extensive diet/nutrition information (including peanut consumption) of normal weight and obese pregnant women and longitudinally examined their children’s brain development using advanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). They also collected biospecimens from the pregnant women and their children. This provides an excellent opportunity to leverage the MOON cohort to study potential impacts of peanut consumption on early brain development. Specifically, the cooperator and his research team plan to extract peanuts and peanut products consumption information during pregnancy and associate it with offspring brain development. They will perform sophisticated brain imaging post-processing and quantitative analysis to study the relationships between peanut consumption during pregnancy and neonatal brain structural and functional development. They will also evaluate maternal and child fecal microbiota composition and function by metagenomics, maternal serum metabolite profile and inflammatory cytokines expression, and maternal milk metabolites to determine whether these parameters are impacted by peanut consumption and can be linked to changes in child brain development. The main hypothesis is that peanut consumption during pregnancy promotes butyrate producing gut microbes, alters milk lipid metabolites, and lowers inflammation markers in the blood, and is associated with better neonatal brain structural and functional development which can be reflected by neuroimaging.
Approach:
Study participants: Healthy pregnant women enrolled for the MOON study and their newborns will be included.
Diet, biosamples, and other information already collected: Dietary intake information of the pregnant women including nut and peanut consumption was assessed using questionnaires at 3 time points during pregnancy. Fasted blood, urine, and stool samples were also collected. Milk samples were collected after delivery. In addition, blood and stool samples from their newborns were also collected.
Imaging data already acquired: The newborns underwent an MRI examination of the brain without sedation, which included high resolution structural scans for brain anatomy, advanced diffusion scans for mapping brain white matter microstructures, and resting-state functional MRI scans for mapping brain functional networks.
Post-processing of imaging data: The structural MRI images will be processed using customized pipelines by the research team. For functional imaging, both seed-based and graph theory analysis approaches will be used to compute functional connectivity in different networks. For diffusion imaging, appropriate advanced neuroimaging tools will be used for both voxel-wised and tractography analyses.
Evaluate biosamples for peanut consumption, microbiome, metabolites, and immune response: Shotgun metagenomics of mothers and neonate’s fecal samples will be performed to determine the microbiota composition and function. Plasma very long chain fatty acids in the study participants will be evaluated and targeted analyses will be conducted on triacylglycerols through neutral loss analysis. Urinary phenolic metabolites which have been shown to increase with peanuts intake will be measured. Mothers and neonate’s fecal and serum samples will also be submitted to TMIC for metabolite data collection. Milk lipids such as phospholipids, triglycerides and sphingolipids will also be measured. Univariate and multivariate methods will be used for an exploratory analysis of the data to identify metabolites that show changes across conditions. Inflammatory cytokines expression in the serum samples will be measured using human ELISA kits and multivariate data analyses methods.