BACKGROUND Despite the perceived importance of early life nutrition for mental development, few studies have related gestational undernutrition to later-life cognitive functioning. We investigated the consequences of gestational exposure to the Dutch famine of 1944-45 for cognitive functioning at the age of 59 years. METHODS We recruited men and women who were (i) born in birth clinics in Ams...

OBJECTIVE The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis has been proposed to be susceptible to fetal programming, the process by which an adverse fetal environment elicits permanent physiological and metabolic alterations predisposing to disease in later life. It is hypothesized that fetal exposure to poor circumstances alters the set point of the HPA axis, leading to increased HPA axis activit...

OBJECTIVES To quantify the relation between prenatal famine exposure and adult mortality, taking into account mediating effects of intermediary life conditions. DESIGN Historical follow-up study. SETTING The Dutch famine (Hunger Winter) of 1944-1945 which occurred towards the end of WWII in occupied Netherlands. STUDY POPULATION From 408,015 Dutch male births born 1944-1947, examined for ...

After the success of the Green Revolution in conquering famine in India, Pakistan and elsewhere in Asia in the 1960s, the world entered a prolonged period of plentiful and cheap food. As documented by Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman in their book Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty, this abundance shifted attention away from further agricultural development, particularly fo...

Going hungry: The Irish Famine of the 1840s may appear a distant memory, but new strains of the pathogen that triggered it are still emerging and threatening food security. The image shows the Famine Monument at Dublin. (Photo: Professor Colin R. Howard (http://www.colinhoward.co.uk/photography.htm).) A simple line graph can tell a story of unimaginable tragedies. The population of Ireland incr...

C. One-third of the world’s people, living in the developing nations, suffer serious hunger and malnutrition and live in fear of famine. The United States has 6% of the world’s population but consumes 40% of the world’s resources. As a nation we waste more of the earth’s products than many poor countries have for their entire sustenance. More money is spent annually on the average American dog ...

There were four horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Famine, Disease and Death, a historic association which has continued into modern times. For most of history, the disease most commonly linked with this awful partnership has been typhus, and typhus has become known as the archetypal famine fever. The aetiology of the disease has, however, rarely been examined in its historical context; as a resu...