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(Circulation. 2008;117:341-343.)
© 2008 American Heart Association, Inc.

Editorial

Impaired Fetal Growth, Cardiovascular Disease, and the Need to Move on

Wulf Palinski, MD; Claudio Napoli, MD, PhD, MBEth

From the Department of Medicine, University of California San Diego, La Jolla (W.P.), and the Department of General Pathology and Excellence Research Center on Cardiovascular Diseases, 1st School of Medicine, II University of Naples, Naples, Italy (C.N.).

Correspondence to Wulf Palinski, University of California San Diego, Department of Medicine, 0682, 9500 Gilman Dr, La Jolla, CA 92093–0682. E-mail wpalinski@ucsd.edu

Key Words: Editorials • cardiovascular diseases • pregnancy • prevention • risk factors

An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract.

The final step in the acceptance of a new medical hypothesis is often the approval of significant funding to investigate it. In the case of developmental programming (ie, the notion that the in utero environment determines susceptibility to many diseases later in life), this has recently come in the form of support by the US Congress for the National Children’s Study, a $3 billion project to follow the impact of environmental factors before, during, and after pregnancy on disease manifestation in some 100 000 children up to the age of 25 years.¹ This initiative will, no doubt, yield a wealth of correlative data and identify many new factors potentially affecting developmental programming.

Article p 405

Much of the concept underlying the National Children’s Study stems from the pioneering work of Barker and colleagues,² whose epidemiological observation of increased cardiovascular risk in children with low birth weight has spurred a large number of retrospective studies during the past 30 years. Despite some conflicting results, most of these studies support the notion that reduced birth weight is indeed associated with increased hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and cardiovascular disease. However, the strong correlation between birth weight and duration of gestation, plus the fact that a short gestation also may be associated with cardiovascular risk,³ poses the question to what extent low birth weight is truly responsible. In this issue of Circulation, an article by Kaijser and coworkers⁴ at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm provides a convincing answer. By scanning 250 000 records of . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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