We examine the role of early childhood health in human capital accumulation. Using a unique data set from Ghana with comprehensive information on individual, family, community, school quality characteristics and a direct measure of intelligence together with test scores, we examine the long-term cognitive effects of the 1983 famine on survivors. We show that differences in intelligence test sco...

The nutrition transition relates to broad patterns of diet, activity and body composition that have defined our nutritional status in various stages of history. The world is rapidly shifting from a dietary period in which the higher income countries were dominated by patterns of nutrition-related non-communicable diseases (NR-NCDs; while the lower and middle world were dominated by receding fam...

BACKGROUND Famine exposure during the early stage of life is related to a number of adulthood diseases. The objective of this study was to examine the association of early life exposure to the famine in China (1959-1961) with the risk of anaemia in adulthood. METHODS We used the data of 2007 adults born between 1954 and 1964 in Jiangsu province from the 2002 Chinese National Nutrition and Hea...

World War I irrevocably changed the face of the world, including Croatia and its capital Zagreb. While between 1880 and 1910 Zagreb became a modern European city, World War I (1914-1918) was marked by new municipal regulations that overturned the everyday life of the city. Social conditions reached catastrophic proportions, especially in the later years of the war. Soldiers and refugees swarmed...

In "Staging Famine Irish Memories of Migration and National Performance in Ireland and Québec" Jason King examines recent community theater productions about the Irish Famine migration to Québec in 1847. King explores community-based and national ideas of performance and the role of remembrance in shaping and transmitting the diasporic identities of Québec's Irish cultural minority. While most ...

BACKGROUND The manipulation of pregnancy diets in animals can lead to changes in DNA methylation with phenotypic consequences in the offspring. Human studies have concentrated on the effects of nutrition during early gestation. Lacking in humans is an epigenome-wide association study of DNA methylation in relation to perturbations in nutrition across all gestation periods. METHODS We used the...

Prenatal famine in humans has been associated with various later-life consequences, depending on the gestational timing of the insult and the sex of the exposed individual. Epigenetic mechanisms have been proposed to underlie these associations. Indeed, animal studies and our early human data on the imprinted IGF2 locus indicated a link between prenatal nutritional and DNA methylation. However,...

China underwent its most murderous famine between 1958 and 1962. Although a demographic transition from the countryside to cities was in early stage gross domestic product (GDP) per capita among lowest world, objective conditions were far less decisive than Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policies bringing about famine. A development strategy copied on Soviet model favoured quick industrializatio...

OBJECTIVE To examine the association between early-life exposure to the Chinese famine and the risk of chronic lung diseases in adulthood. DESIGN Data analysis from a cross-sectional survey. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS 4135 subjects were enrolled into the study from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) 2011-2012 baseline survey to analyse the associations between prenata...

OBJECTIVE Fetal malnutrition may predispose to type 2 diabetes through gene programming and developmental changes. Previous studies showed that these effects may be modulated by genetic variation. Genome-wide association studies discovered and replicated a number of type 2 diabetes-associated genes. We investigated the effects of such well-studied polymorphisms and their interactions with fetal...