A study based on the deadly famine that killed millions of people in the Ukraine in the early 1930s revealed the long-term effect of malnutrition on the developing fetus.
The tragic history is remembered by Ukrainians as the Holodomor, which means death by starvation. Food supplies in 1932 and 1933 were deliberately cut off by the Soviet Union, leading to varying levels of malnutrition throughout the provinces of Ukraine.
Now, a study of Ukraine’s diabetes registry found that survivors of the Holodomor peak in the worst-affected provinces were more likely to more than twice as likely to give birth to a child who would later go on to develop type II. diabetes, compared to pregnant women without fullness.
These observations took place between forty and seven years after the famine.
“The findings … point to long-term public health consequences of the current Russia-Ukraine war,” write Austrian physicists Peter Klimek and Stefan Thurner, who were not involved in the current study.
The United Nations World Food Program estimates that by 2023, about 11 million Ukrainians were at risk of starvation. In the same year, 187,000 children were born.
If today’s famine has the same intergenerational impact on infant development as the Holodomor, Klimek and Thurner estimate that 19,000 people could be affected by diabetes in the coming decades. .
Other studies about the Holodomor found that type II diabetes was 1.5 times more common in men and women living in areas with severe, historical famine.
But this new analysis investigates how malnutrition during pregnancy and childhood affects long-term health outcomes in the next generation, nationwide.
A research team led by epidemiologist LH Lumey of Columbia University compared birth data from 1930 to 1938 in all but one province of Ukraine, using diabetes registries to from 2000 to 2008.
Their final study included more than 10 million births in Soviet Ukraine in the years 1930 to 1938.
About 15 percent were born in areas with extreme hunger, and about 40 percent were born in areas with hunger classified as ‘very severe’.
Finally, Lumey and his colleagues observed a “more than twofold increase in the probability of development [type II diabetes mellitus] in later life among people born in the famine-stricken provinces of Ukraine in early 1934.”
This birth would have been conceived during the six months in 1933 when the Ukrainian famine was at its worst, killing about 28,000 people a day. In fact, more than 80 percent of all deaths attributed to the Holodomor occurred in the first seven months of 1933.
Compared to research on historical famines in China, a recent study found that only people who were in their mothers’ wombs during the Ukrainian famine were at increased risk of developing type II diabetes later in life.
Babies exposed to the Ukrainian copper famine during pregnancy or during pregnancy or early in life did not face the same risks.
“Our review of famine studies from China showed that adverse health outcomes in middle age were commonly associated with early life exposure to famine,” write Lumey and colleagues. him.
But these estimates grouped children of all ages together, and as the authors explain, it may only be in the early stages of growth where malnutrition is a risk factor for metabolic syndrome.
“Although there is a chance of contracting this disease [type II diabetes] “based on many factors, exposure to starvation in these cases appears to be the dominant factor above all others,” concluded Lumey and colleagues.
The lesson was published in Science.
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