This conclusion was reached by an analysis that began in 1934, studied birth records included notations on the baby’s size, the dimensions of the surface of the placenta, and other information about age, height and weight the mother, as well as previous pregnancies.
The study found that the risk of heart disease from a man after 40 years could be related, at least in part, to the dimensions of the body of his mother and the size of the placenta when he was born.
“A chronic illness is the result of maternal nutrition throughout your life and your child’s early growth,” he said in a news release from the European Society of Cardiology, the study’s lead author, Dr. David Barker, professor of clinical epidemiology at University of Southampton in the UK.
“It is not simply a consequence of poor lifestyle in the later stages of life. Rather, it is a result of changes in the normal processes of human development.”
The researchers found the risk of heart disease in adult male later appeared to increase between:
- Men whose mothers were low, had their first pregnancy and placentas showed relatively oval (which indicates that the development of the placenta had been discontinued).
- Men whose mothers were high and sturdy, and placentas were relatively small (which could have limited the growth of the baby in the middle of gestation).
- Men whose mothers were high and had a body mass index (BMI) of less than normal, and whose placentas were heavy in relation to birth weight (BMI of the mother was suggested that poor nutrition during pregnancy, explained Barker .)
Regardless of the combination in play, those men most likely to develop heart disease in adulthood tended to be relatively thin at birth.
This, say the authors, was an indication that malnutrition was a factor at birth.
