The Developmental Origins of Health and Disease paradigm evaluates the consequences of early life stress on health at later stages of life. Interacting with this paradigm represents a profound opportunity to leverage the lifespan and contextual approaches to human skeletal remains adopted by bioarchaeological research. Teeth and bone provide evidence for stressors experienced early in life. These events represent evidence for adaptive plasticity as Individuals survive the events through reallocation of energy to essential physiological functions, which inhibits enamel and skeletal growth. Age‐at‐death, adult body size, chronic infection, or childhood mortality may be used as covariates to better understand the physiological constraints operating on individual bodies following survival of early life stress. Contextual evidence from cemeteries provides clues to the ecological and cultural contingencies that exacerbate or mitigate the expression of these trade‐offs. Future studies should incorporate newly derived methods that provide reproducible and precise ways to evaluate early life stress, while incorporating populations that are often neglected.
- Award ID(s):
- 2018997
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10274898
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- American Journal of Physical Anthropology
- ISSN:
- 0002-9483
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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One of the most well-known yet least understood aspects of the 1918 influenza pandemic is the disproportionately high mortality among young adults. Contemporary accounts further describe the victims as healthy young adults, which is contrary to the understanding of selective mortality, which posits that individuals with the highest frailty within a group are at the greatest risk of death. We use a bioarchaeological approach, combining individual-level information on health and stress gleaned from the skeletal remains of individuals who died in 1918 to determine whether healthy individuals were dying during the 1918 pandemic or whether underlying frailty contributed to an increased risk of mortality. Skeletal data on tibial periosteal new bone formation were obtained from 369 individuals from the Hamann–Todd documented osteological collection in Cleveland, Ohio. Skeletal data were analyzed alongside known age at death using Kaplan–Meier survival and Cox proportional hazards analysis. The results suggest that frail or unhealthy individuals were more likely to die during the pandemic than those who were not frail. During the flu, the estimated hazards for individuals with periosteal lesions that were active at the time of death were over two times higher compared to the control group. The results contradict prior assumptions about selective mortality during the 1918 influenza pandemic. Even among young adults, not everyone was equally likely to die—those with evidence of systemic stress suffered greater mortality. These findings provide time depth to our understanding of how variation in life experiences can impact morbidity and mortality even during a pandemic caused by a novel pathogen.
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Abstract Objectives Maternal experiences before pregnancy predict birth outcomes, a key indicator of health trajectories, but the timing and pathways for these effects are poorly understood. Here we test the hypothesis that maternal pre‐adult growth patterns predict pregnancy glucose and offspring fetal growth in Cebu, Philippines.
Methods Using multiple regression and path analysis, gestational age‐adjusted birthweight and variables reflecting infancy, childhood, and post‐childhood/adolescent weight gain (conditional weights) were used to predict pregnancy HbA1c and offspring birth outcomes among participants in the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey.
Results Maternal early/mid‐childhood weight gain predicted birth weight, length, and head circumference in female offspring. Late‐childhood/adolescent weight gain predicted birth length, birth weight, skinfold thickness, and head circumference in female offspring, and head circumference in male offspring. Pregnancy HbA1c did not mediate relationships between maternal growth and birth size parameters.
Discussion In Cebu, maternal growth patterns throughout infancy, childhood, and adolescence predict fetal growth via a pathway independent of circulating glucose, with stronger impacts on female than male offspring, consistent with a role of developmental nutrition on offspring fetal growth. Notably, the strength of relationships followed a pattern opposite to what occurs in response to acute pregnancy stress, with strongest effects on head circumference and birth length and weakest on skinfolds. We speculate that developmental sensitivities are reversed for stable, long‐term nutritional cues that reflect average local environments. These findings are relevant to public health and life‐history theory as further evidence of developmental influences on health and resource allocation across the life course.
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.24338
