ArticleAmerican journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council
Hormonal evidence supports the theory of selection in utero.
Article in American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 27 citations in OpenAlex.
- Secondary Sex Ratio in the Face of Global Challenges: Beyond the Headlines.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2025Review
- Unveiling the Effects of Natural Disasters and Nuclear Energy on the Secondary Sex Ratio: A Comprehensive Review.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Sex Ratio at Birth after Concurrent Events of Earthquakes and the COVID-19 Pandemic in Croatia.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2024Article
- Twinning during the pandemic: Evidence of selectionEvolution, medicine, and public health · 2021Article
- Reproductive suppression, birth defects, and periviable birth.Evolutionary applications · 2018Article
- Early embryo mortality in natural human reproduction: What the data say.F1000Research · 2016Article
- Fetal sex differences in human chorionic gonadotropin fluctuate by maternal race, age, weight and by gestational age.Journal of developmental origins of health and disease · 2015Article
- Article
- Economic downturns and male cesarean deliveries: a time-series test of the economic stress hypothesis.BMC pregnancy and childbirth · 2014Article
- A test of maternal human chorionic gonadotropin during pregnancy as an adaptive filter of human gestations.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2012Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
10 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
objectivesAntagonists in the debate over whether the maternal stress response during pregnancy damages or culls fetuses have invoked the theory of selection in utero to support opposing positions. We describe how these opposing arguments arise from the same theory and offer a novel test to discriminate between them. Our test, rooted in reports from population endocrinology that human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) signals fetal fitness, contributes not only to the debate over the fetal origins of illness, but also to the more basic literature concerned with whether and how natural selection in utero affects contemporary human populations.
methodsWe linked maternal serum hCG measurements from prenatal screening tests with data from the California Department of Public Health birth registry for the years 2001-2007. We used time series analysis to test the association between the number of live-born male singletons and median hCG concentration among males in monthly gestational cohorts.
resultsAmong the 1.56 million gestations in our analysis, we find that median hCG levels among male survivors of monthly conception cohorts rise as the number of male survivors falls.
resultsElevated median hCG among relatively small male birth cohorts supports the theory of selection in utero and suggests that the maternal stress response culls cohorts in gestation by raising the fitness criterion for survival to birth.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.