Milk Phospholipid Profiling Among Japanese Women with Differing Docosahexaenoic Acid Levels

Hiroshi M Ueno; Andrew MacKenzie; Dawn Scott; Satoshi Higurashi; Yasuhiro Toba; Toshiya Kobayashi

doi:10.1097/PG9.0000000000000058

Milk Phospholipid Profiling Among Japanese Women with Differing Docosahexaenoic Acid Levels

JPGN Rep. 2021 Mar 30;2(2):e058. doi: 10.1097/PG9.0000000000000058. eCollection 2021 May.

Authors

Hiroshi M Ueno¹, Andrew MacKenzie², Dawn Scott², Satoshi Higurashi¹, Yasuhiro Toba¹, Toshiya Kobayashi¹

Affiliations

¹ From the Research and Development Department, Bean Stalk Snow Co., Ltd., Kawagoe, Japan.
² Callaghan Innovation, Wellington, New Zealand.

Abstract

To characterize the milk phospholipids (PLs) profile using phosphorus-31 nuclear magnetic resonance (³¹P-NMR) and to investigate the effect of elevated milk docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) levels on PLs profiles in Japanese mothers.

Methods: Milk samples from eligible patients with high and low DHA from a former cross-sectional study (n = 20; n = 10 for each group) were included. Fifteen milk PLs were analyzed using ³¹P-NMR, and the profiles were compared group-wise using Mann-Whitney U-test. The P value of <0.05 was considered statistically significant.

Results: The median DHA content in milk was 1.13% and 0.29% for the high and low milk DHA groups, respectively. Twelve PLs, excluding lysophosphatidylserine, cardiolipin, and phosphatidylglycerol, were detected in all participants with 100% positive results. The median concentrations and proportions of total PLs, sphingophospholipids, and glycerophospholipids were comparable between groups. The proportions of choline-containing glycerophospholipid were significantly higher in the high milk DHA group than that in the low milk DHA group (24.09% [median, interquartile range: 23.08%-26.38%] and 21.41% [20.74%-22.84%], P = 0.019). Although the proportions of phosphatidylinositol were significantly lower in the high milk DHA group than that in the low milk DHA group (6.62% [5.75%-6.72%] versus 7.63% [7.11%-8.16%], P = 0.002), while that of phosphatidylcholine (21.90% [18.51%-23.22%] versus 19.78% [18.17%-20.26%], P = 0.059) and alkyl-acyl phosphatidylcholine (0.60% [0.40%-0.74%] versus 0.33% [0.14%-0.51%], P = 0.059) were higher in the former than that in the latter.

Conclusions: Our results were comparable to that of the previous literature. Large variations in the milk DHA might affect the composition of choline-containing glycerophospholipids in Japanese mothers. However, possible confounders were not excluded in the study populations.

Keywords: human milk; phosphorus-31 nuclear magnetic resonance; polar lipids.

Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Wolters Kluwer on behalf of European Society for Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition and North American Society for Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition.