Stunting and Selection Effects of Famine: A Case Study of the Great Chinese Famine

Gørgens, Tue; Meng, Xin; Vaithianathan, Rhema

doi:10.2139/ssrn.958702

Cited by 83 publications

(117 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…Qian (2009), Chen andZhou (2007) and Gørgens et al (2007) here find negative effects for children exposed to the Chinese famine for height, weight, weight-forheight, education and labor supply, income and housing space for survivors that experienced the famine during early childhood.…”

Section: Early Life Undernourishment and Later Life Outcomesmentioning

confidence: 68%

Effects of prenatal and early life malnutrition: Evidence from the Greek famine

Neelsen

Stratmann

2011

Journal of Health Economics

125

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Effects of Prenatal and Early Life Malnutrition: Evidence from the Greek Famine Abstract This paper examines the long run education and labor market effects from early-life exposure to the Greek 1941-42 famine. Given the short duration of the famine, we can separately identify the famine effects for cohorts exposed in utero, during infancy and at one year of age. We find that adverse outcomes due to the famine are largest for infants. Further, in our regression analysis we exploit the fact that the famine was more severe in urban than in rural areas. Consistent with our prediction, we find that urban-born cohorts show larger negative impacts on educational outcomes than the rural-born cohorts. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor mayJEL-Code: I10, I12, I29, J13, J24.

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Section: Early Life Undernourishment and Later Life Outcomesmentioning

confidence: 68%

Effects of prenatal and early life malnutrition: Evidence from the Greek famine

Neelsen

Stratmann

2011

Journal of Health Economics

125

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“…Nutritional adversity is common in human populations and is frequently linked to low socioeconomic status (57,58). Within the study of early childhood development, the biological sensitivity to context hypothesis (59) and the convergent differential susceptibility hypothesis (60) have used reasoning from evolutionary biology to propose explanations for individual variation in how humans react to their environment.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Gene–environment interplay inDrosophila melanogaster: Chronic food deprivation in early life affects adult exploratory and fitness traits

Burns

Svetec

Rowe

et al. 2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Early life adversity has known impacts on adult health and behavior, yet little is known about the gene-environment interactions (GEIs) that underlie these consequences. We used the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster to show that chronic early nutritional adversity interacts with rover and sitter allelic variants of foraging (for) to affect adult exploratory behavior, a phenotype that is critical for foraging, and reproductive fitness. Chronic nutritional adversity during adulthood did not affect rover or sitter adult exploratory behavior; however, early nutritional adversity in the larval period increased sitter but not rover adult exploratory behavior. Increasing for gene expression in the mushroom bodies, an important center of integration in the fly brain, changed the amount of exploratory behavior exhibited by sitter adults when they did not experience early nutritional adversity but had no effect in sitters that experienced early nutritional adversity. Manipulation of the larval nutritional environment also affected adult reproductive output of sitters but not rovers, indicating GEIs on fitness itself. The natural for variants are an excellent model to examine how GEIs underlie the biological embedding of early experience.genotype-environment interaction | plasticity T he question of how individual differences arise is fundamental to biology, psychology, and precision medicine (1, 2). From studies on mammals, we know that early adversity places individuals on developmental trajectories for health and behavior that can last a lifetime (3, 4). However, for the most part, this idea has not been investigated in simple model genetic organisms, such as the worm Caenorhabditis elegans or the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, in which gene manipulation can be readily accomplished. Two biological mechanisms that can underlie individual differences, and that go beyond the obsolete notion of nature or nurture, are gene-environment interactions (GEIs) and epigenetics. Here, we explore GEIs in the context of early adversity. In particular, we address how early adversity interacts with natural variants of the foraging (for) gene to affect adult behavior and fitness in D. melanogaster.Within human populations, nutritional adversity can lead to substantive effects on cognitive and behavioral development (5, 6). The question of how early adversities perturb normal development is a difficult one, because both the strength and timing of adversity can matter. For example, in humans, detrimental effects are seen after chronic protein or carbohydrate deprivation, yet one or a few acute deprivations have little long-term effect (7). Similarly, in fruit flies, levels of hemolymph carbohydrate affected by 3 h of food deprivation return to normal levels after just 2 h of refeeding (8). Moreover, not all individuals are affected equally by early nutritional adversity (9, 10), and these individual differences arise from GEIs.In evolutionary biology, GEIs can be important for the maintenance and expression of both phenotypic plasticit...

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“…The Russian Empire and Soviet Union experienced a series of widespread famines, the worst of which occurred from 1932 to 1934 in what is now Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and the Volga Region of Russia (Sharygin 2010) and is estimated to have affected 70 million people. The Chinese Famine of 1959 to 1961 was the result of a combination of crop failures and the mobilisation of rural populations to work in industrial centres as part of Mao's Great Leap Forward (Chen and Zhou 2007;Gørgens et al 2012). With an estimated thirty million deaths over the course of the famine, it was determined that daily energy intake fell to an average of about 1500 kcal per person (Ashton et al 1984).…”

Section: Comparison Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The most evident of these impacts is stunted growth (low height for age). The effect of malnutrition on achieved stature is pronounced: child survivors of twentieth-century famines are height stunted by an average of 1-3 cm compared with their age-matched peers (Gørgens et al 2012;Sharygin 2010). Stunting is the most common growth impairment observed in developing countries (more common than low weight for height), with fully 74 per cent of the global burden of stunting confined to the world's poorest countries in Africa and South-Central Asia (Dewey and Begum 2010).…”

Section: Individual Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%