ReviewEvolution, medicine, and public health2018
Life history trade-offs and the partitioning of maternal investment: Implications for health of mothers and offspring.
Review in Evolution, medicine, and public health, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers.
What it found
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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
37 citing papers in PubMed, 56 citations in OpenAlex.
- Beyond Deterministic Fetal Programming: Intrauterine Exposures and the Multifactorial Origins of Adiposity.Obesity reviews : an official journal of the International Association for the Study of Obesity · 2026Review
- Body composition, geography and ethnicity: understanding the associations with health.European journal of clinical nutrition · 2026Review
- Organ Size and Metabolic Rate Co-Vary with Dimensions of the Obstetric Pelvis: The Metabolic Coordination of Childbirth Hypothesis.American journal of biological anthropology · 2026Article
- Experimental evidence of life history trade-offs during ultra-endurance physical activity.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- Maternal Phenotype, Infant Size and Breast Milk Composition in Women Living With HIV.Maternal & child nutrition · 2025Article
- Effect of exercise during pregnancy on offspring development through ameliorating high glucose and hypoxia in gestational diabetes mellitus.World journal of diabetes · 2024Article
- Reconsidering the developmental origins of adult disease paradigm: The 'metabolic coordination of childbirth' hypothesis.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2024Review
- Reverse-engineering the Venus figurines: An eco-life-course hypothesis for the aetiology of obesity in the Palaeolithic.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2024Review
- Host-gut microbiota interactions during pregnancy.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2024Review
- Meager Milk: Lasting Consequences for Adult Daughters of Primiparous Mothers Among Rhesus Macaques (Macaca mulatta).Integrative and comparative biology · 2023Article
- Natural selection and human adiposity: crafty genotype, thrifty phenotype.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Intergenerational transmission of height in a historical population: From taller mothers to larger offspring at birth (and as adults).PNAS nexus · 2023Article
- Impact of energy availability and physical activity on variation in fertility across human populations.Journal of physiological anthropology · 2023Review
- Long-term trends in human body size track regional variation in subsistence transitions and growth acceleration linked to dairying.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Maternal capital predicts investment in infant growth and development through lactation.Frontiers in nutrition · 2023Article
- Do maternal grandmothers influence breastfeeding duration and infant nutrition? Evidence from Merida, Mexico.American journal of biological anthropology · 2022Article
- Formal models for the study of the relationship between fluctuating asymmetry and fitness in humans.American journal of biological anthropology · 2022Article
- Birth, love, and fear: Physiological networks from pregnancy to parenthood.Comprehensive psychoneuroendocrinology · 2022Review
- Intergenerational change in anthropometry of children and adolescents in the New Delhi Birth Cohort.International journal of epidemiology · 2022Article
- Girls start life on an uneven playing field: Evidence from lowland rural Nepal.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Lay Summary: This review sets out the hypothesis that life history trade-offs in the maternal generation favour the emergence of similar trade-offs in the offspring generation, mediated by the partitioning of maternal investment between pregnancy and lactation, and that these trade-offs help explain widely reported associations between growth trajectories and NCD risk. Growth patterns in early life predict the risk of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), but adaptive explanations remain controversial. It is widely assumed that NCDs occur either because of physiological adjustments to early constraints, or because early ecological cues fail to predict adult environmental conditions (mismatch). I present an inter-generational perspective on developmental plasticity, based on the over-arching hypothesis that a key axis of variability in maternal metabolism derives from life history trade-offs, which influence how individual mothers partition nutritional investment in their offspring between pregnancy and lactation. I review evidence for three resulting predictions: (i) Allocating relatively more energy to growth during development promotes the capacity to invest in offspring during pregnancy. Relevant mechanisms include greater fat-free mass and metabolic turnover, and a larger physical space for fetal growth. (ii) Allocating less energy to growth during development constrains fetal growth of the offspring, but mothers may compensate by a tendency to attain higher adiposity around puberty, ecological conditions permitting, which promotes nutritional investment during lactation. (iii) Since the partitioning of maternal investment between pregnancy and lactation impacts the allocation of energy to 'maintenance' as well as growth, it is expected to shape offspring NCD risk as well as adult size and body composition. Overall, this framework predicts that life history trade-offs in the maternal generation favour the emergence of similar trade-offs in the offspring generation, mediated by the partitioning of maternal investment between pregnancy and lactation, and that these trade-offs help explain widely reported associations between growth trajectories and NCD risk.
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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.