Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Shaping our destiny: genes, environment and their interactions
- 2 Mother and fetus
- 3 Fetal choices
- 4 Predictive adaptive responses and human disease
- 5 Obesity, diabetes and other diseases
- 6 The biology of predictive adaptive responses
- 7 Predictive adaptive responses – critical processes in evolution
- 8 Evolutionary echoes and the human camel
- 9 Improving human health
- 10 Fetal futures
- Further reading and references
- Index
6 - The biology of predictive adaptive responses
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Shaping our destiny: genes, environment and their interactions
- 2 Mother and fetus
- 3 Fetal choices
- 4 Predictive adaptive responses and human disease
- 5 Obesity, diabetes and other diseases
- 6 The biology of predictive adaptive responses
- 7 Predictive adaptive responses – critical processes in evolution
- 8 Evolutionary echoes and the human camel
- 9 Improving human health
- 10 Fetal futures
- Further reading and references
- Index
Summary
The combination of experimental, clinical and epidemiological data relating an adverse perinatal environment to long-term outcome has one particularly striking feature. That is, despite the variety of models examined, there is a remarkable consistency in the phenotype that emerges in adulthood. The common features include a tendency to insulin resistance, increased blood pressure, vascular endothelial dysfunction, altered lipid and carbohydrate metabolism, a tendency to obesity and small muscle mass. We have termed this the survival phenotype for reasons that are discussed below.
This raises two important questions. First, why is it so easy to produce a consistent phenotype from such a variety of prenatal environments? Second, what is the biological basis for the development of this phenotype? The answers to these questions need to apply to both humans and animals because the PARs theory applies across species. In turn this leads to the more general question of the fundamental biological mechanisms underpinning PARs. These fundamental mechanisms must be independent of whether the PARs that are induced in utero are subsequently appropriate or inappropriate. They are also likely to be independent of the specific intrauterine situation in which they arose. These questions are the focus of this chapter.
Such questions can be asked at several levels. At one level there are a set of issues about the nature of the environmental cues that the embryo and fetus respond to, and secondly about when in development these cues act.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Fetal Matrix: Evolution, Development and Disease , pp. 118 - 143Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004