Abstract
Obesity increases the risk of a number of pregnancy complications, potentially due to chronic inflammation. We predicted that an obesogenic high-fat diet (HFD) in mice would create an inflammatory environment that would exacerbate the effects of lipopolysaccharide (LPS), an inflammatory insult, administered during pregnancy. Females were placed on a HFD or a low-fat diet (LFD) prior to mating, injected with 2 µg LPS or control on gestational day 7 and collected on day 14. Treatment with LPS increased the odds that a female thought to be pregnant at injection had no conceptuses at day 14 (p = 0.024), suggesting that injection with LPS was more likely to induce complete abortion. However, there was no effect of diet on the odds of having no conceptuses at day 14 and no interaction between diet and LPS injection. Diet and LPS injection had no effect on the number of viable fetuses in females still pregnant at day 14. For fetal weight, there was a significant interaction between diet and treatment (p = 0.017), whereby LPS reduced fetal weight in HFD females but not in LFD females. However, LPS treatment of HFD females reduced fetal weight to that observed in control-injected LFD females. Although LPS increased the odds of abortion, there was little evidence that a HFD exacerbated the effects of LPS.