TY - JOUR
T1 - Contextual adversity, telomere erosion, pubertal development, and health
T2 - Two models of accelerated aging, or one?
AU - Belsky, Jay
AU - Shalev, Idan
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© Cambridge University Press 2016.
PY - 2016/11/1
Y1 - 2016/11/1
N2 - Two independent lines of inquiry suggest that growing up under conditions of contextual adversity (e.g., poverty and household chaos) accelerates aging and undermines long-term health. Whereas work addressing the developmental origins of health and disease highlights accelerated-aging effects of contextual adversity on telomere erosion, that informed by an evolutionary analysis of reproductive strategies highlights such effects with regard to pubertal development (in females). That both shorter telomeres early in life and earlier age of menarche are associated with poor health later in life raises the prospect, consistent with evolutionary life-history theory, that these two bodies of theory and research are tapping into the same evolutionary-developmental process whereby longer term health costs are traded off for increased probability of reproducing before dying via a process of accelerated aging. Here we make the case for such a claim, while highlighting biological processes responsible for these effects, as well as unknowns in the epigenetic equation that might instantiate these contextually regulated developmental processes.
AB - Two independent lines of inquiry suggest that growing up under conditions of contextual adversity (e.g., poverty and household chaos) accelerates aging and undermines long-term health. Whereas work addressing the developmental origins of health and disease highlights accelerated-aging effects of contextual adversity on telomere erosion, that informed by an evolutionary analysis of reproductive strategies highlights such effects with regard to pubertal development (in females). That both shorter telomeres early in life and earlier age of menarche are associated with poor health later in life raises the prospect, consistent with evolutionary life-history theory, that these two bodies of theory and research are tapping into the same evolutionary-developmental process whereby longer term health costs are traded off for increased probability of reproducing before dying via a process of accelerated aging. Here we make the case for such a claim, while highlighting biological processes responsible for these effects, as well as unknowns in the epigenetic equation that might instantiate these contextually regulated developmental processes.
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U2 - 10.1017/S0954579416000900
DO - 10.1017/S0954579416000900
M3 - Article
C2 - 27688015
AN - SCOPUS:84989267353
SN - 0954-5794
VL - 28
SP - 1367
EP - 1383
JO - Development and Psychopathology
JF - Development and Psychopathology
IS - 4
ER -