The developmental origins of health and disease and intergenerational inheritance: a scoping review of multigenerational cohort studies

Abstract

Epidemiologic research has increasingly acknowledged the importance of developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD) and suggests that prior exposures can be transferred across generations. Multigenerational cohorts are crucial to verify the intergenerational inheritance among human subjects. We carried out this scoping review aims to summarize multigenerational cohort studies’ characteristics, issues, and implications and hence provide evidence to the DOHaD and intergenerational inheritance. We adopted a comprehensive search strategy to identify multigenerational cohorts, searching PubMed, EMBASE, and Web of Science databases from the inception of each dataset to June 20th, 2022, to retrieve relevant articles. After screening, 28 unique multigenerational cohort studies were identified. We classified all studies into four types: population-based cohort extended three-generation cohort, birth cohort extended three-generation cohort, three-generation cohort, and integrated birth and three-generation cohort. Most cohorts (n = 15, 53%) were categorized as birth cohort extended three-generation studies. The sample size of included cohorts varied from 41 to 167,729. The study duration ranged from two years to 31 years. Most cohorts had common exposures, including socioeconomic factors, lifestyle, and grandparents’ and parents’ health and risk behaviors over the life course. These studies usually investigated intergenerational inheritance of diseases as the outcomes, most frequently, obesity, child health, and cardiovascular diseases. We also found that most multigenerational studies aim to disentangle genetic, lifestyle, and environmental contributions to the DOHaD across generations. We call for more research on large multigenerational well-characterized cohorts, up to four or even more generations, and more studies from low- and middle-income countries.

Birth weight and nutritional status in school‐age children from Boane city, Mozambique

“…Our results are in line with previous studies carried out with LBW children, where a reduction in the percentage of body fat, fat mass, and BMI was found (FAO/PAHO, 2016; Nobre et al, 2020;Santos et al, 2018;Tzioumis & Adair, 2014). Our findings with Mozambican children fit the pattern of the short-term adaptive response devised by DOHaD hypothesis which is already well-known and described in cohort studies in several countries (Tan et al, 2024). These short-term adaptive responses are seen as evolutionary strategies that enhance the chances of immediate survival and reproductive success in environments with fluctuating resource availability (Bateson et al, 2014).…”