With news of terrorism constantly bombarding headlines, a unique report hinting at eating disorders comes out of study about war victims. No, this isn’t an Iraqi study. Rather, a look back in time to the last years of World War II when Dutch citizens experienced a severe famine dubbed, the Dutch Hunger Winter of 1944-45.
The cause was a German food embargo. It forced food rationing for all individuals living in the Netherlands at the time.Each person received only 667 kilocalories of food per day—barely enough to survive. Making matter worse, some of these Dutch citizens were pregnant during the famine.
Researchers teamed up to see what changes might have occurred in the unborn babies exposed to nutritional deprivation. Bastiaan Heijmans at Leiden University Medical Center, The Netherlands and L.H. Lumey at Columbia University, New York, NY, poured through the health records of the so-called “Hunger Winter Families.” Even after 6 decades, the researchers were able to locate surviving children of the starved mothers. The researchers then divided the children into two groups: the first had mothers who were exposed to famine during the early stages of pregnancy, and the other suffered near-starvation later in gestation.
As the final step, Heijmans and Lumey’s team analyzed the DNA of both groups of babies (now grown up, of course) and compared it to the DNA of their siblings, who had not been conceived during the famine. The results are a provocative signal that a mother’s nutritional deprivation can cause permanent damage to her unborn baby’s DNA.
In order to work properly to control our systems of life, cells in the body stud DNA with biochemical called methyl groups. The studding is known as “imprinting” and works like a life-long dimmer switch to turn up or down the level of gene activity. The Dutch and American researchers found that the children of mothers who were deprived of fuel early in the pregnancy had fewer methyl groups on a gene that controls a crucial growth factor in the body. This paucity has been associated in other studies with increased risk including schizophrenia and heart disease.
On the other hand, children of mothers exposed later in their pregnancies had the same amount of methyl groups as their unexposed siblings, indicated a normal risk for adult diseases. However, these babies were born, on average low birth weight, which can lead to future medical complications such as respiratory distress syndrome, bleeding in the brain, and heart problems.
These war-impregnated findings have profound implications for mothers-to-be actively engaging in the “battle of the bulge.”
For eating disorders researchers, the study says that using low birth weight alone to assess the impact of an eating disordered mother on her child is not enough. Nanoscopic DNA changes are equally, if not more powerful, ways to predict a baby’s ultimate health.
“To monitor the crucial stages of early development,” L.H. Lumey writes, “assessing maternal lifestyle, especially regarding nutrition, and embryo growth using three dimensional ultasonography may be more appropriate than assessing birth weight.”
Comments