ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2013
Influence of early-life nutrition on mortality and reproductive success during a subsequent famine in a preindustrial population.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 59 papers.
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Who cites it
59 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Mothers facing greater environmental adversity experience increased costs of reproduction.Science advances · 2025Article
- Access to Abundant Resources Mitigates the Effects of Nutritional Status on Life History Trade-Offs: An Experimental Study on Burying Beetles.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Childhood nutritional stress and later-life health outcomes in medieval England: Evidence from incremental dentine analysis.Science advances · 2025Article
- Poor developmental conditions decrease adult body size and egg size, but not egg laying rate and survival throughout adulthood: A long-term experiment in a precocial bird.The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Article
- Body size as a mediator of climatic effects: Insights from a long-term study of social Iberian magpies.Ecology · 2025Article
- Initiation of metformin in early pregnancy results in fetal bioaccumulation, growth restriction, and renal dysmorphology in a primate model.American journal of obstetrics and gynecology · 2024Article
- Fertility resilience varies by socioeconomic status and sex: Historical trends in childlessness across 150 years.iScience · 2024Article
- Reconsidering the developmental origins of adult disease paradigm: The 'metabolic coordination of childbirth' hypothesis.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2024Review
- Early and adult life environmental effects on reproductive performance in preindustrial women.PloS one · 2024Article
- Early life drought predicts components of adult body size in wild female baboons.American journal of biological anthropology · 2023Article
- Leveraging big data to uncover the eco-evolutionary factors shaping behavioural development.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Maternal capital predicts investment in infant growth and development through lactation.Frontiers in nutrition · 2023Article
- Asinine milk mitigates stress-mediated immune, cortisol and behavioral responses of piglets to weaning: A study to foster future interventions in humans.Frontiers in immunology · 2023Article
- Hardship at birth alters the impact of climate change on a long-lived predator.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Early-life conditions impact juvenile telomere length, but do not predict later life-history strategies or fitness in a wild vertebrate.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Epigenetic regulation of 5α reductase-1 underlies adaptive plasticity of reproductive function and pubertal timing.BMC biology · 2022Article
- Change of pace: How developmental tempo varies to accommodate failed provision of early needs.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2021Review
- Examining the trade-offs between human fertility and longevity over three centuries using crowdsourced genealogy data.PloS one · 2021Article
- Socioeconomic status effects on health vary between rural and urban Turkana.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2021Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Individuals with insufficient nutrition during development often experience poorer later-life health and evolutionary fitness. The Predictive Adaptive Response (PAR) hypothesis proposes that poor early-life nutrition induces physiological changes that maximize fitness in similar environments in adulthood and that metabolic diseases result when individuals experiencing poor nutrition during development subsequently encounter good nutrition in adulthood. However, although cohort studies have shown that famine exposure in utero reduces health in favorable later-life conditions, no study on humans has demonstrated the predicted fitness benefit under low later-life nutrition, leaving the evolutionary origins of such plasticity unexplored. Taking advantage of a well-documented famine and unique datasets of individual life histories and crop yields from two preindustrial Finnish populations, we provide a test of key predictions of the PAR hypothesis. Known individuals from fifty cohorts were followed from birth until the famine, where we analyzed their survival and reproductive success in relation to the crop yields around birth. We were also able to test whether the long-term effects of early-life nutrition differed between individuals of varying socioeconomic status. We found that, contrary to predictions of the PAR hypothesis, individuals experiencing low early-life crop yields showed lower survival and fertility during the famine than individuals experiencing high early-life crop yields. These effects were more pronounced among young individuals and those of low socioeconomic status. Our results do not support the hypothesis that PARs should have been favored by natural selection and suggest that alternative models may need to be invoked to explain the epidemiology of metabolic diseases.
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