Morphofunctional and immunological cardiac evaluation of protein restriction on rat offspring.

Cardiovascular diseases affect a large part of the population during adulthood. Several epidemiological and experimental studies have demonstrated an association between maternal protein restriction and a marked risk of developing heart disease during early intrauterine and postnatal life. Maternal nutritional conditions act by modulating the microenvironment, thus favoring adaptive processes of the fetal organism for development to occur.