Evolutionary life history theory as an organising framework for cohort studies: insights from the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey

ABSTRACT

By tracking a group of individuals through time, cohort studies provide fundamental insights into the developmental time course and causes of health and disease. Evolutionary life history theory seeks to explain patterns of growth, development, reproduction and senescence, and inspires a range of hypotheses that are testable using the longitudinal data from cohort studies. Here we review two decades of life history theory-motivated work conducted in collaboration with the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey (CLHNS), a birth cohort study that enrolled more than 3000 pregnant women in the Philippines in 1983 and has since followed these women, their offspring and grandoffspring. This work has provided evidence that reproduction carries “costs” to cellular maintenance functions, potentially speeding senescence, and revealed an unusual form of genetic plasticity in which the length of telomeres inherited across generations is influenced by reproductive timing in paternal ancestors. Men in Cebu experience hormonal and behavioural changes in conjunction with changes in relationship and fatherhood status that are consistent with predictions based upon other species that practice bi-parental care. The theoretical expectation that early life cues of mortality or environmental unpredictability will motivate a “fast” life history strategy are confirmed for behavioural components of reproductive decision making, but not for maturational tempo, while our work points to a broader capacity for early life developmental calibration of systems like immunity, reproductive biology and metabolism. Our CLHNS findings illustrate the power of life history theory as an integrative, lifecourse framework to guide longitudinal studies of human populations.

KEYWORDS:

• Epidemiology
• evolution
• reproduction
• growth
• plasticity

Acknowledgements

The CLHNS is a long-running study that has involved numerous institutions and collaborators. The authors first and foremost thank three generations of study participants for their willingness to contribute to the study since its inception nearly 4 decades ago. The authors thank Barry Popkin, Wilhelm Flieger, and the other researchers responsible for designing the baseline and original longitudinal study. They thank Karen Mohlke for her role in bringing the study of genetic and related processes to the study. They also thank the many interviewers, project staff, lab technicians, volunteers and co-authors, who are too numerous to list here.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

We thank the National Science Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health for funding the research questions reviewed here: National Science Foundation (Biological Anthropology): BCS 0542182 (Lampl/Kuzawa), BCS 0746320 (Kuzawa), BCS 0746320 (Kuzawa/Quinn), BCS 0962212 (Kuzawa/Gettler), BCS 0962282 (Kuzawa/Eisenberg), BCS 1317133 (Kuzawa), BCS-1440564 (McDade), BCS-1519110 (Eisenberg), BCS 1751912 (Kuzawa/Ryan); Wenner Gren Foundation: Gr. 7356 (Kuzawa), Gr. 8111 (Eisenberg), Gr. 8186 (Gettler); National Institutes of Health: R01 AG039443 (Adair), R01 HD054501 (Adair), R03 HD062715 (Kuzawa/Rutherford) R01 HL085144 (Adair), R01 AG061006 (Kuzawa).