Descrizione del progetto
L’interazione tra natura e cultura
Si tratta di natura o di cultura? Come interagisce l’ambiente dell’infanzia con la predisposizione genetica per formare casualmente i risultati in età avanzata? Esistono ambienti determinati in grado di acuire o ridurre le disuguaglianze in fatto di salute nella popolazione? Sono queste le domande che si è posto il progetto DONNI, finanziato dall’UE. Per trovare le risposte, il progetto sta combinando i progressi di varie discipline. Esso valuterà gli effetti a lungo termine delle variazioni a breve termine nelle condizioni dell’infanzia e verificherà l’ipotesi secondo cui le interazioni tra geni e ambiente siano in grado di modellare i risultati in età avanzata.
Obiettivo
The “Developmental Origins of Health and Disease” (DOHaD) hypothesis states that insults in early life can have lifelong, irreversible impacts, affecting individuals’ health and well-being in older age. My proposed research builds on this in two main ways. First, I will use natural experiments to investigate the causal impact of early life circumstances on later life outcomes, focusing on novel (1) nutritional, (2) toxicological, (3) health and (4) economic environments in early life. Within these, I will consider insults (i) for which there is insufficient knowledge of their long-term impacts, (ii) which are relevant today, and (iii) importantly, which are modifiable. Second, I will go beyond the old “nature versus nurture” debate and investigate how individuals’ genes (‘nature’) interacts with the above early life environments (‘nurture’) in creating inequalities in health and well-being.
Whilst neither the estimation of causal effects within DOHaD, nor the estimation of the gene-environment (GxE) interplay is new, their combination is. Indeed, it is currently not known how the early life environment interacts with genetic predisposition to causally shape later life outcomes, as well as whether certain environments exacerbate or reduce health inequalities in the population. Combining advancements across disciplines, I will evaluate the long-term effects of short-term variations in early life conditions (objective 1), and I will directly test the hypothesis that gene-environment interactions causally shape later life outcomes (objective 2). I will digitize historical data on early life environmental exposures and merge these with large-scale individual-level data. As such, my proposal will investigate the extent to which genes interact with the environment, using natural experiments to identify interventions that can ameliorate inequalities in health and well-being (objective 3).
Programma(i)
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
ERC-STG - Starting GrantIstituzione ospitante
BS8 1QU Bristol
Regno Unito