ReviewEvolution, medicine, and public health2015
Is preterm birth a human-specific syndrome?
Review in Evolution, medicine, and public health, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 36 citations in OpenAlex.
- Gestation length both shapes and is shaped by other life history traits in terrestrial eutherian mammals.Evolution letters · 2025Article
- The evolution of gestation length in eutherian mammals.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Development of an adverse outcome pathway for intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy.Current research in toxicology · 2022Article
- Article
- Does birth weight affect neonatal body weight, growth, and physiology in an animal model?PloS one · 2021Article
- Maternal determinants of gestation length in the rhesus monkey.Trends in developmental biology · 2021Article
- Developing a theoretical evolutionary framework to solve the mystery of parturition initiation.eLife · 2020Review
- Infant survival in western lowland gorillas after voluntary dispersal by pregnant females.Primates; journal of primatology · 2020Article
- Accounting for diverse evolutionary forces reveals mosaic patterns of selection on human preterm birth loci.Nature communications · 2020Article
- Relaxed constraint and functional divergence of the progesterone receptor (PGR) in the human stem-lineage.PLoS genetics · 2020Article
- Preterm birth in evolutionary context: a predictive adaptive response?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Review
- Genome-wide association analysis uncovers variants for reproductive variation across dog breeds and links to domestication.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2019Article
- The Microbiome and Complement Activation: A Mechanistic Model for Preterm Birth.Biological research for nursing · 2017Review
- GEneSTATION 1.0: a synthetic resource of diverse evolutionary and functional genomic data for studying the evolution of pregnancy-associated tissues and phenotypes.Nucleic acids research · 2016Article
- Integrating Diverse Types of Genomic Data to Identify Genes that Underlie Adverse Pregnancy Phenotypes.PloS one · 2015Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Human preterm birth (PTB), a multifactorial syndrome affecting offspring born before 37 completed weeks of gestation, is the leading cause of newborn death worldwide. Remarkably, the degree to which early parturition contributes to mortality in other placental mammals remains unclear. To gain insights on whether PTB is a human-specific syndrome, we examined within- and between-species variation in gestation length across placental mammals and the impact of early parturition on offspring fitness. Within species, gestation length is normally distributed, and all species appear to occasionally give birth before the 'optimal' time. Furthermore, human gestation length, like that of many mammalian species, scales proportionally to body mass, suggesting that this trait, like many others, is constrained by body size. Premature humans suffer from numerous cognitive impairments, but little is known of cognitive impairments in other placental mammals. Human gestation differs in the timing of the 'brain growth spurt', where unlike many mammals, including closely related primates, the trajectory of human brain growth directly overlaps with the parturition time window. Thus, although all mammals experience early parturition, the fitness costs imposed by the cognitive impairments may be unique to our species. Describing PTB broadly in mammals opens avenues for comparative studies on the physiological and genetic regulators of birth timing as well as the development of new mammalian models of the disease.
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