Obesity is a major health disease which involves numerous metabolic disorders. Increasing evidence suggests that the risk of developing the pathology in adulthood may be influenced through inappropriate perinatal nutrition. In our study, we first investigated the impact of a maternal high-fat (HF) diet, which is known to induce hypothalamic leptin resistance in adult offspring (Férézou-Viala et al., 2007), to develop obesity in a rich diet environment (P diet). Our results showed that surprisingly, HF maternal diet protected offspring against body weight gain induced by P diet. In a second part of the thesis, we studied mechanisms of action of CNTF, a neurocytokine which could protect some people against body weight gain induced by a P diet (Vacher et al., 2008). Results of this study showed that CNTF ant its subunits receptors could translocate to the hypothalamic cell nucleus to induced POMC transcription.
