Environmental influences on health and development: nutrition, substance exposure, and adverse childhood experiences

Abstract

Scientific advances over the last century have generated compelling evidence of the primary and secondary effects of gestational, infant, and childhood conditions. These early environmental influences have the potential not only to impact an individual's health outcomes, such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and cancer, but also to confer various protections and risks to that individual's descendants. The immediate and extended ramifications of early environmental exposure bring an understanding of epidemiological impact on disease states and a hope for prevention. This review highlights the contributions of several key population studies and briefly explores specific environmental influences, including nutritional deficiencies, exposure to substances and infections, and adverse childhood experiences. Mechanisms of these influences (e.g. stress and epigenetics) are discussed, as well as possible means of mitigating their negative consequences. What this paper adds Substance exposures in utero are associated with epigenetic changes and negative outcomes. Adverse childhood experiences in early childhood can induce HPA and epigenetic changes.

Intimate Partner Violence: A Risk Factor for Gestational Diabetes

“…Women with GDM have an increased risk of developing obesity, metabolic disease, and type 2 diabetes in later life [3]. Furthermore, the "developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD)" theory proposes intergenerational consequences where the offspring of mothers with GDM have an increased risk of obesity and metabolic syndrome during childhood and later in life [32].…”

Adverse childhood experiences and adult diet quality

“…size of prefrontal cortex) and function (e.g. dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis), the multi-system involvement of these variables within the human body, and the contextual importance of environmental factors for any such variables or systems, there are many pathways which could potentially result in an ACE-adult diet quality (as represented by the HEI-10) association (19,(29)(30)(31)(32)(33)(34) .…”

Synergies between the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease framework and multiple branches of evolutionary anthropology

“…Overwhelmingly, the last 30+ years of DOHaD‐related research has confirmed this basic idea that early life environment influences health and disease risks across the lifespan 4 . This body of work has also elucidated many of the physiological and biochemical mechanisms that link developmental exposures with subsequent disease risks 3–7 …”

“…4 This body of work has also elucidated many of the physiological and biochemical mechanisms that link developmental exposures with subsequent disease risks. [3][4][5][6][7] The foregoing description of a developmental framework may sound familiar to readers who have not previously encountered the acronym "DOHaD" because it reflects a core concept from evolutionary biology used regularly by evolutionary anthropologists: ontogenetic or developmental plasticity. 8 Developmental plasticity is the tendency for developing organisms to adjust non-canalized aspects of their growth strategies in response to environmental stimuli.…”

“…The DOHaD framework, however, is distinct from developmental plasticity in that DOHaD, with its origins in the human health sciences, focuses preferentially on humans (though a variety of organisms are used as experimental models for particular aspects of human physiology), whereas developmental plasticity applies to any multicellular organism 9 . Hypotheses and predictions derived from the DOHaD framework generally emphasize health outcomes 2,6,7 ; in contrast, predictions derived from the developmental plasticity framework often emphasize aspects of biological fitness, that is, differential survival and reproduction 10,11 . While aspects of an organism's health may in some instances correlate positively with its expected fitness, in other instances we should expect health to be traded off energetically against investment in reproduction 4,10–12 …”