IJE Advance Access originally published online on February 29, 2008
International Journal of Epidemiology 2008 37(2):255-259; doi:10.1093/ije/dyn034
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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association © The Author 2008; all rights reserved.
Commentary: The development of the Ounsteds’ theory of maternal constraint—a critical perspective
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Keppel St., London WC1E 7HT, UK. E-mail: david.leon@lshtm.ac.uk
Accepted 4 February 2008
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Margaret Ounsted conducted one of the earliest studies of the association between parental and offspring birth weights in humans published in the biomedical literature. From 19651 until shortly before her death in 1988, she published a series of papers that elaborated the notion of a maternal regulatory mechanism of fetal growth constraint. These have been continuously cited in the literature on inter-generational determinants of fetal growth.2–4 Over the past decade it has found a new and more general resonance in the context of the fetal/developmental origins of adult disease.5–9 What has attracted particular interest is the suggestion that the mechanism of in utero growth constraint is transmitted in a non-Mendelian fashion through the maternal line. Most tantalisingly, Ounsted hypothesized that the ‘set point’ of this mechanism is determined by the mother's own experience of constraint when she herself was in utero. These ideas were already evident in a paper