DOHaD – the challenge of translating the science to policy

Abstract

The DOHaD Society has passed its 10th birthday, so it seems an appropriate time to reflect on what has been achieved and the Society’s aspirations. At the 10th International Congress in Rotterdam in November 2017, Peter Gluckman (the Society’s first President) delivered a plenary lecture entitled ‘DOHaD – addressing the science-policy nexus: a reality check’; in opening the Congress, Mark Hanson (second, and outgoing President) not only highlighted the success of the Society but also the challenges it now faces in achieving impact for its work in the global health arena, that is beyond the research agenda; and in assuming the role of third President, Lucilla Poston highlighted the need for the Society to grasp opportunities to change healthcare policy, while persevering with basic research and well-planned intervention studies. In this review we summarize the points made in these three presentations and issue a call to action to the membership to take up the challenge of taking the Society’s work to the next level of translating science to policy.

The Utah Population Database. The Legacy of Four Decades of Demographic Research

“…With the genealogical structure of UPDB, the data can then link the circumstances of the parents and more distant ancestors to the life course of the target individual for fertility, health, socioeconomic, and mortality outcomes. UPDB data provide the kind of data that supports and is consistent with the perspective advanced by the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) concept (Gage, Munafo, & Davey Smith, 2016;Hanson, Poston, & Gluckman, 2019;Penkler, Hanson, Biesma, & Muller, 2019). Overall, deep longitudinal data with nearly complete family ascertainment over many generations provide the necessary ingredients for life-course research.…”

In Utero Exposure to Bisphenol a Promotes Mammary Tumor Risk in MMTV-Erbb2 Transgenic Mice Through the Induction of ER-erbB2 Crosstalk

“…Increasing studies support the concept of developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD), which emphasizes the impact of changes of pre-and peri-natal environment on adult diseases susceptibility [50]. Lessons from cancer risks associated with "DES daughters" have led to studies on breast/mammary tumor risk associated with in utero exposure to other hormonal disruptors [4].…”

Developmental Physiology: Grand Challenges

“…DOHaD is now influencing many fields of research (Suzuki, 2018 ), including epidemiology (Heindel et al, 2017 ), epigenetics (Safi-Stibler and Gabory, 2020 ), specific pathophysiologies (Arima and Fukuoka, 2020 ; Briana and Malamitsi-Puchner, 2020 ) and policy and public health (Loi et al, 2013 ), to name but a few such fields. Among the many challenges for human-oriented studies in DOHaD is translating what we learn from developmental studies into actionable clinical and public health practices (Hanson et al, 2019 ). What is increasingly understood is how early developmental trajectories can be programmed by early developmental events.…”