Epigenetics study finds that children born during the historic recession have markers of accelerated ageing later in life.
. But only a handful of studies have succeeded in finding these trends in humans, says Ainash Childebayeva, a biological anthropologist at the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
This is partly because subjecting people to harmful events such as famines to see how gene expression is shaped would be unethical. Instead, scientists have to look back on major historical events to determine whether those events affected people’s biology later in life. The Great Depression and its aftermath offered Schmitz and her colleague one such opportunity.
The cells could have altered the epigenetic tags during early childhood or later in life. But the results suggest that some sort of biological foundation was laid before birth for children of the Great Depression that affected how they would age, epigenetically, later in life. It’s not clear whether diet, stress or some other factor drove the accelerated ageing, and without being able to go back in time and tease apart those effects, it will be hard to pin down the biological mechanisms behind the signal, Childebayeva says. Nonetheless, “these kinds of studies are really important because they highlight how early development matters for health and disease outcomes later in life”, she says.
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