Malnourishment in a pregnant woman has a lasting effect on her child’s DNA. This was the implications of a new study on children born during the famine of World War II.
Scientists studied the DNA of children who were born to women starved during the 1944 Hunger Winter in the Netherlands. They analyzed a gene called insulin-like growth factor 2 or IGF2, an important growth hormone. Methyl groups that attach to IGF2 very early in fetal development determine how much of the growth hormone is made later, and protect the DNA from damage.
The scientists found that those children (now …read more