Genetics at the maternal-placental-fetal interface: insights into fetal growth and cardiometabolic health.

The early life period is critical for long term health. Fetal growth abnormalities and cardiometabolic diseases are interconnected and cause high burden of morbidity. Understanding the complex genetic and environmental factors that underlie these relationships is crucial to developing preventive and therapeutic interventions for maximizing health across the life span. The placenta is critical for fetal development and potentially underlies later onset diseases, but it is understudied. Moreover, to date, perinatal genomic studies have failed to capture human ancestral diversity, which impedes biological understanding of diseases and could fuel disparities in genomic-informed health care in the future. In the genetic epidemiology research group, we study genetic mechanisms of fetal growth variations at the maternal-placental-fetal interface and their links with cardiometabolic outcomes in diverse human populations. Our studies so far demonstrated that genetic and epigenetic processes that regulate fetal development and placental response to maternal metabolic and psychosocial factors may offer translational insights to early origins of cardiometabolic diseases in later life.Air date: 12/7/2023 2:00:00 PM
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