Word: heart
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...that environmental conditions in the womb may have lifelong effects on the fetus is certainly not new. British epidemiologist D.J. Barker first proposed his theory of fetal origins in 1992, arguing that when the fetus doesn't get enough nutrition in utero, for example, an increased risk of future heart disease and diabetes somehow gets "programmed" into his or her development. There wasn't very much data to back Barker's theory at the time, but over the decades, a wealth of animal and human data has suggested it's true. Maternal conditions like high blood pressure and diabetes...
...that analyzed federal survey data collected from 1982 to 1996. Researchers found, for instance, that people who were born in the U.S. just after the 1918 flu pandemic (that is, people who were still in utero when the disease was at its peak) had a higher risk of a heart attack in their adulthood than those born before or long after the pandemic. (See pictures of thermal scanners hunting for swine...
...findings, published in the Journal of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease, are based largely on survey data available on some 100,000 Americans who were born between 1915 and 1923. Overall, these populations had roughly the same rate of heart attack year to year - about 200 heart attacks per 1,000 people - when they were studied some 60 years later. But among the subset of people born between October 1918 and June 1919, when the flu pandemic was at its worst, the number of heart attacks increased more than...
...link between a mother's influenza and her child's cardiac health, physical stature or risk of mental illness? Well, we don't really know. What we do know is that it's probably not the flu virus itself. There is no known biochemical mechanism that links heart disease or other health outcomes to prenatal exposure to flu. And the flu virus, unlike the pathogens that cause herpes, German measles and syphilis, is not teratogenic - that is, it doesn't cause malformations in the fetus, says Dr. Ellen Harrison, the director of obstetrical medicine at the Montefiore Medical Center...
Researchers' best guess is that a flu infection causes stress in the mother, which might in turn affect fetal development. During pregnancy, a woman's heart and lungs are working substantially harder than usual, and her immune system is compromised, so a few infections (like influenza) may potentially become more intense. Although most pregnant women who get the flu survive with no serious problems, they are still more likely than other healthy adults to also develop respiratory failure and secondary bacterial infections like pneumonia - potentially fatal conditions that may require hospitalization and mechanical ventilation. "It is these severe cases that...