ArticleJournal of public health research2024
The fascinating theory of fetal programming of adult diseases: A review of the fundamentals of the Barker hypothesis.
Article in Journal of public health research, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 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
15 citing papers in PubMed, 20 citations in OpenAlex.
- Promotion of long-term health in early life.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- DNA methylation informs adult cardiovascular risk and prevention for low birthweight individuals.Journal of global health · 2026Article
- Elevated zygotic let-7f-5p alters developmental trajectories and sex-specific somatic growth.iScience · 2026Article
- Environmental roots of neonatal health: how social and structural exposures shape early-life outcomes.Pediatric research · 2026Review
- Introducing theJournal of marriage and the family · 2026Article
- Longitudinal Changes in General Overweight and Obesity, and Central Obesity from Birth to Early Adolescence.Nutrients · 2026Article
- Neonatal Brain Volumes and Early Parenting Behavior as Mediators in Associations Between Prenatal Social Disadvantage and Socioemotional Problems in Toddlers.Biological psychiatry · 2026Article
- PODiaCarD: a prototype of a digital twin platform for the management of pediatric obesity and related cardiometabolic complications.European journal of pediatrics · 2026Article
- Motherhood, the "blank slate," and the language of surrogacy.Frontiers in global women's health · 2026Article
- The maternal-fetal communicatome: a scoping review and network physiology perspective on a unified, adaptive, and multiscale interaction network.Frontiers in network physiology · 2026Review
- Pushing your luck: on chance, serendipity, and athlete development.Sports medicine - open · 2025Article
- Maternal BMI and Diet Quality Modulate Pregnancy Oxidative and Inflammatory Homeostasis.Nutrients · 2025Observational
- Perinatal Predictors and Mediators of Attachment Patterns in Preschool Children: Exploration of Children's Contributions in Interactions with Mothers.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Assisted Reproductive Technologies: A New Player in the Foetal Programming of Childhood and Adult Diseases?Pediatric reports · 2024Review
- Different Levels of Therapeutic Strategies to Recover the Microbiome to Prevent/Delay Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) or Arrest Its Progression in Children.International journal of molecular sciences · 2024Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors at 3 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The theory of fetal programming of adult diseases was first proposed by David J.P. Barker in the eighties of the previous century, to explain the higher susceptibility of some people toward the development of ischemic heart disease. According to his hypothesis, poor maternal living conditions during gestation represent an important risk factor for the onset of atherosclerotic heart disease later in life. The analysis of the early phases of fetal development is a fundamental tool for the risk stratification of children and adults, allowing the identification of susceptible or resistant subjects to multiple diseases later in life. Here, we provide a narrative summary of the most relevant evidence supporting the Barker hypothesis in multiple fields of medicine, including neuropsychiatric disorders, such as Parkinson disease and Alzheimer disease, kidney failure, atherosclerosis, coronary heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer onset and progression, metabolic syndrome, and infectious diseases including COVID-19. Given the consensus on the role of body weight at birth as a practical indicator of the fetal nutritional status during gestation, every subject with a low birth weight should be considered an "at risk" subject for the development of multiple diseases later in life. The hypothesis of the "physiological regenerative medicine," able to improve fetal organs' development in the perinatal period is discussed, in the light of recent experimental data indicating Thymosin Beta-4 as a powerful growth promoter when administered to pregnant mothers before 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.