The developmental origins of health and disease and intergenerational inheritance: a scoping review of multigenerational cohort studies

Abstract

Abstract Background Epidemiologic research has increasingly acknowledged the importance of developmental origins of health and disease and suggests that prior exposures can be transferred across generations. Understanding the intergenerational inheritance has profound implications for developing public health interventions to prevent diseases. Multigenerational cohorts are crucial to verify the above-mentioned issues among human subjects. We carried out this scoping review aims to map existing literature to summarize multigenerational cohort studies' characteristics, issues, and implications and hence provide evidence to the developmental origins of health and disease hypothesis and intergenerational inheritance. Methods This study followed Arksey and O’Malley’s five-stage scoping review framework. We adopted a three-step search strategy to identify multigenerational cohorts comprehensively, searching PubMed, EMBASE, and Web of Science databases from the inception of each dataset to June 20th, 2022, to retrieve relevant articles. We aim to include all the existing multigenerational cohorts. Data of included cohorts were extracted using a standardized tool, to form a descriptive analysis and a thematic summary. Results After screening, 28 unique multigenerational cohort studies were identified. We classified all studies into four types: population-based cohort extended three generation cohort, birth cohort extended three generation cohort, three generation cohort, and integrated birth and three generation cohort. Most cohorts (n = 15, 53%) were categorized as birth cohort extended three-generation studies. The sample size of included cohorts varied from 41 to 167,729. The study duration ranged from two years to 31 years. Most cohorts had comprehensive data collection schemes. Almost all cohorts had common exposures, including socioeconomic factors, lifestyle, and grandparents’ and parents’ health and risk behaviors over the life course. These studies usually investigated intergenerational inheritance of diseases as the outcomes, most frequently, obesity, child health, and cardiovascular diseases. Conclusions Most multigenerational studies aim to disentangle genetic, lifestyle and environmental contributions to the developmental origins of health and disease across generations. We call for more research on large multigenerational well-characterized cohorts, up to four or even more generations, and more studies from low-and middle-income countries.