1000 days vs. 100 years: Complexities of programming relevant to placentology

The more we know about fetal programming the more urgent it becomes to understand the placenta's secrets. Discovery is urgent because chronic disease in many countries is on the rise. Back when birth weight was the primary predictor of cardiovascular disease in adulthood, the problem seemed simple. Placental to birth weight ratios were the whole story. However, a new series of discoveries has revealed that: a) the placenta is the key organ that determines the risk for many common chronic diseases and b) our understanding of placental biology is very primitive. We have learned over the past few years that the size, shape, weight, surface area and axis dimensions of the placenta all have independent predictive powers for chronic disease at least within a given population. These features hold for placentas from Helsinki, Amsterdam, Portland, Mysore, India and Unizah, Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, the predictive power of combinations of placental phenotype and indicators of maternal body composition indicate that maternal/fetal/placental interactions are the living substrate for most chronic diseases including cardiac and vascular disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and several cancers. Maternal phenotypic characteristics associated with programming include BMI, height, lean mass and pelvic dimensions. Social living conditions are important too. Programming is now recognized as being very complex and involves transgenerational nutritional flow, periconceptional embryonic nutrition, mat...
Source: Placenta - Category: Reproduction Medicine Authors: Tags: Frontmatter Source Type: research