One of the more intriguing pathways being followed by some researchers the last few years is the one that follows along the theory that lots of the health outcomes that we experience as mature adults are actually a function or a result of what happened to us not only 20 or 30 years earlier, that is, in adolescence or early adulthood, but rather that many of the health conditions we develop in midlife and our senior years are actually a consequence of what happened to us in early childhood, even infancy, and perhaps even in utero.
For example, it’s now very well established that the odds of developing osteoporosis in adulthood are highly related to the exercise we do – or that we don’t do – when we’re much younger. The same relationship – what we do or don’t do as kids or even younger leading to disease much later in life – holds for some cancers (breast cancer in adults, for example, has been linked to exercise in our young years, as the risk of melanoma is related to sun exposure in childhood, and others), some cases of high blood pressure and heart disease and strokes, and so on.
Well, according to a fascinating recent study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, some cases of dementia in adulthood may even be traced to what happened to our moms while we were still in utero.
In this study, the researchers conclude that people who’d been exposed to severe prenatal malnutrition in the Netherlands during World War II (that is, their moms were literally starving while pregnant with them) had significantly higher odds of suffering early cognitive decline in adulthood compared to those who’d not been similarly exposed to malnutrition in utero, that is, people who’d been fetuses carried by moms suffering severe malnutrition during the war were at higher risks of cognitive deficits in midlife than their peers who had been carried by moms who had enough to eat while pregnant.
Just another clear indication why a village raises a child, because when a pregnant woman doesn’t get enough good food to eat, we all pay the costs eventually.
