Low availability of carnitine precursors as a possible reason for the diminished plasma carnitine concentrations in pregnant women

BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth

Research Article

Gregor Seliger¹  Nicole Hanisch²  Robert Ringseis³  Klaus Eder³ 

[1] Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, St. Elisabeth Hospital, Halle, Germany;Institute of Agricultural and Nutritional Sciences, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Halle, Germany;Institute of Animal Nutrition and Nutrition Physiology, Justus-Liebig-University, Giessen, Germany;

关键词: Pregnant Woman;    Ferritin;    Carnitine;    Iron Status;    Free Carnitine;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2393-10-17

 received in 2009-10-16, accepted in 2010-04-25,  发布年份 2010

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundIt has been shown that plasma carnitine concentrations decrease markedly during gestation. A recent study performed with a low number of subjects suggested that this effect could be due to a low iron status which leads to an impairment of carnitine synthesis. The present study aimed to confirm this finding in a greater number of subjects. It was moreover intended to find out whether low carnitine concentrations during pregnancy could be due to a reduced availability of precursors of carnitine synthesis, namely trimethyllysine (TML) and γ-butyrobetaine (BB).MethodsBlood samples of 79 healthy pregnant women collected at delivery were used for this study.ResultsThere was only a weak, non-significant (P > 0.05), correlation between plasma concentration of ferritin and those of free and total carnitine. There was no correlation between other parameters of iron status (plasma iron concentration, hemoglobin, MCV, MCH) and plasma concentration of free and total carnitine. There were, however, significant (P < 0.05) positive correlations between concentrations of TML and BB and those of free and total carnitine in plasma.ConclusionsThe results of this study suggest that an insufficient iron status is not the reason for low plasma carnitine concentrations observed in pregnant women. It is rather indicated that low plasma carnitine concentrations are caused by a low availability of precursors for carnitine synthesis during gestation.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Ringseis et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2010. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.