Compass Futures: The Neonatal Origin of Adult Diseases

Researchers find a correlation between low birth weight babies and the development of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases in adulthood. (Wikipedia)

In the United States, one person dies every 37 seconds from cardiovascular disease. However, the disease’s prevalence is not limited to the United States. Scientists and doctors all over the world continuously study cardiovascular diseases. In Sweden, for example, at the Karolinska Institutet—a research university in Solna—a group of researchers recently published a study in the Journal of the American Heart Association on how such diseases might stem from neonatal causes. 

The group knew that prematurely delivered babies with low birth weights often struggle with cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) later in life, but they saw a gap in the understanding of the CRF of low-birth weight babies that were carried to term. Thus, in their research, they studied 280,000 males who were born 37-41 weeks after conception from the time they were born until they were in the age range of 17-to-24-years-old. Then, the men were asked to perform a physical exam on a bike ergometer. 

The researchers found that for every pound of birth weight, the men had a 13 percent decrease in the risk of premature death and a 15 percent decrease in the risk of developing cardiovascular disease, based on their metabolic equivalents from the bike ergometer. Daniel Berglind, one of the researchers, remarked, “the magnitude of the difference we observed is alarming.” 

With the results of their study, the researchers call on clinicians to consider whether the origin of an adult patient’s cardiorespiratory disease could be neonatal. They also emphasize the importance of prenatal care in reducing the chance that a baby could be born with a low birth weight.

This is not the first study that has shown how low-birth weight babies can have higher risk of disease. In a 2019 study led by the University of Melbourne, researchers from Australia, Norway, Finland, the U.K., and the Netherlands found that babies born weighing less than 3.3 lbs are four times more likely to have respiratory difficulty by adulthood. The lead researcher from that study, Professor Lex Doyle, similarly asks for doctors to consider the neonatal origins of disease. "Physicians should obtain a perinatal history, including gestational age at birth, birthweight, and bronchopulmonary dysplasia, when assessing adults with airway disease,” said Doyle.