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You had mothers, grandmothers, great grandmothers, whose offspring — I won’t say learned — but received signals, anticipating a lean world

Although it sounds weird, evidence has accrued in population studies and in animal research that stressful prenatal experiences can predispose people to chronic diseases. Several studies have found that people who were in utero during famines are more likely to have cardiovascular disease, diabetes or the erosion of a key cognitive ability than those who were not. People who were exposed to the influenza epidemic of 1918 in early life were more likely to die of cardiovascular disease than people who were not. Studies in animals have shown that prenatal stresses can cause differences in how genes are expressed. The theory goes that those parental experiences shape the offspring’s metabolism in a way that responds poorly to a world that is not so strained.

Steckel and his graduate student, Garrett Senney, found evidence that the same thing may have happened in the South, when decades of post-Civil War poverty began to be reversed. Modern-day heart disease deaths were higher in states that experienced a rapid rise out of poverty between 1950 and 1980 — even when controlling for the effects of obesity, smoking and education level.

Steckel and Senney are the first to point out the limitations of their study, which used changes in median income as a crude measure of the stresses and nutrition that people were likely to have experienced in the womb. They weren’t able to trace the life trajectories of individual people or families, but instead looked at heart disease deaths among people who were born before the economy improved. They only examined one racial group.

They acknowledge this data is a blunt way to try to answer their complex question. Still, they see the pattern that emerged as a powerful argument for more careful study. If rapid improvements in socioeconomic status carry side effects, it’s something doctors could easily ask their patients about when taking a medical history: Did your parents grow up in poverty?

Map data: Heart Disease Death Rate per 100,000, 35+, White (Non-Hispanic), All Gender, 2011-2013, from Centers for Disease Control.