Focus area(s)

• Environmental Health
• Women’s Health and Environment

It is increasingly evident that stressors in utero, such as malnutrition or chemical exposures, may cause permanent changes in physiology and metabolism that influence the development of, or susceptibility to, disease in adults. Multiple animal models are available to investigate in utero perturbations in gene expression, tissue function, and other developmental pathways that may be linked to later life effects. However, many of these models are quite expensive and time-consuming to develop and use, and their relevance to humans remains to be determined. The ability to use human tissues, short-term animal studies, or rapid in vitro assays to predict adult health risks could rapidly advance our understanding of this topic. Examples include directly measuring biologically-significant concentrations of environmental toxicants in placenta or cord blood, and linking such exposures to gene expression, tissue function, or other developmental changes associated with an adult disease outcome. Thus, major scientific effort is currently being devoted to developing short-term animal studies and human biomarkers of effect that could be used to investigate associations between in utero exposures and diseases later in life.

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