Evolutionary medicine symposium

Nicole Bender organized an Evolutionary Medicine symposium that was presented at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society meeting in Montpellier, France last week.  Abstracts of the talks are below.

Session 28.  Symposium: Evolutionary medicine: challenges and future directions 1. (Pasteur)

Grazyna Jasienska  Reproductive ecology and female health, and lifespan: energy budgets, physiological trade-offs and  antagonistic pleiotropy.  High energetic costs of pregnancy and lactation may cause physiological trade-offs for maternal organism, which  partially explains why women with high parity often have poor health in older age and, consequently, reduced  lifespan. For women, having adequate energy during all stages of life, including periods of fetal and childhood  development, and adulthood, is related to high levels of reproductive steroids hormones. High lifetime levels of  these hormones have both beneficial and detrimental effects: they increase chances of pregnancy, but also the  risk of breast cancer. Intra-individual variation in energetic status that leads to intra-individual variation in levels  of steroid hormones may help to explain the complex relationship between parity and lifespan. This relationship  is further complicated by pleiotropic effects of genes, including APOE, PPAR-gamma, IL-10, ERS1, which encode  traits potentially important for both fertility and health in women. Modern clinical medicine usually  ignores  findings from the area of human reproductive ecology, but evolutionary medicine suggests that this knowledge  might be useful for medical practice and for programs of disease prevention. Most important aspects are  treatment of infertility, prevention of reproductive cancers and prevention of diseases (such as diabetes,  cardiovascular diseases, and Alzheimer’s) the risks of which often increase in women who had high costs of  reproduction. Supported by the Center for Human and Primate Reproductive Ecology (CHaPRE), the Polish  National Science Centre and The Salus Publica Foundation.
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Elodie Vercken & B. Mauroy  Don’t fall off the adaptation cliff! Asymmetrical fitness costs constrain the evolution of human lung.  The human bronchial tree is a branched network, whose function is to bring air from the mouth to the exchange  surface, the acini. The relative size of the branches up and down a bifurcation h is known to be a critical  parameter: too small, the circulation of is impaired by the large hydrodynamic resistance of the tree; too large,  the volume occupied by the bronchial tree reduces drastically the volume left in the chest for the exchange  surface. In order to evaluate lungs efficiency, theoretical models of the bronchial tree have been developed.  These models have been able to predict the optimal value for the parameter h resulting from the compromise  between hydrodynamic resistance and exchange surface. Although quantitatively close, the predictions from  these models are consistently inferior to physiological measures of the parameter h. These models of optimal  bronchial tree geometry are based on a function for  lungs efficiency, equivalent to a fitness function in  evolutionary biology. This fitness function is asymmetrical around the optimal value, therefore cliff-edge effects  are expected to play a role on the evolution of lung geometry. Cliff-edge theory (Mountford, 1969) states that in  presence of variability in phenotypic expression, expected fitness has to be calculated over the range of possible  phenotypes. If the fitness function is asymmetric, the best strategy is not at the apparent maximum of the fitness  function. We propose a mathematical model of population dynamics to predict quantitatively the influence of  cliff-edge effects on the evolution of bronchial tree geometry. Once fitted with empirical data, this model is able  to give precise information on: 1/ the “quantity” of variability suffered by the human bronchial tree ; and 2/ the  distribution of bronchial tree geometries in the population. In particular, our model predicts that, even if the  population is adapted at best, there always exist individuals whose bronchial trees are associated with costs  larger than average, and who ought to be more sensitive to geometrical remodelling.
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Kaspar Staub, U. Woitek, M. Henneberg & F. Rühli  Challenging perspectives in evolutionary medicine: microevolution of human morphology and its  medico-social impact.  Contribution for the SYMPOSIUM ON EVOLUTIONARY MEDICINE: Human morphology is undergoing important  evolutionary changes. The socio-economic and clinical impact of such alterations of human anatomy is mostly  underestimated so far. The newly founded Centre for Evolutionary Medicine (ZEM) at University of Zürich is  focusing on the microevolution of human morphology as one of its major research directions. We present not  only current research data on such morphological traits but also address particularly their medico-social impact.  Based on skeletal samples from ancient to modern times as well as based on historical and modern Swiss Armed  Forces conscription data (N>100 000) we are able to show significant increases in body dimensions, decrease in  skeletal robustness and increase in morphological variability. Using data from the Swiss Armed Forces (universal  conscription, representing 80-100% of the 19-year-old men alive) on the secular trend of height and BMI  between 1875-2010 we can trace the evolution of body dimensions. The trends of height, weight and BMI in  Switzerland show the following pattern: The positive secular height trend (15 cm height gain in 130 years) begun  in the 1890s (birth years 1870s) and slowed down a  hundred years later in the 1990s (birth years 1970s).  Contrary, the trend in body weight did not slow down in the recent decades, average weight continued to rise.  Consequently, average BMI, which did not change between 1879 and the 1950s, shows a marked two-step  increase at the end of the 1980s and again since 2002. A further particular focus of our contribution lays on the  alterations of the axial skeleton (eg. increased frequencies of spina bifida occulta). We will also address specific  consequences for public health measures (target groups for weight reduction programs), medical teaching  (variability of anatomical structures) or clinical research (low back pain etiology).
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Gillian Ragsdale & R. Foley  Parent-of-origin effects on empathy.  Genomic imprinting is a violation of Mendel’s laws that enables selection to act on genes depending on parent- of-origin. This study tested whether there are parent-of-origin effects on the heritability of empathy in the  general population as part of a larger question concerning the role of imprinted genes in the evolution of human  cognition and behaviour. The measure tested was the Empathy Quotient, which was developed by The Autism  Research Centre for use with both general and clinical population samples. To test genomic imprinting  hypotheses correlations in EQ scores between pairs of full, maternal and paternal siblings were compared using  path analysis. Where scores are influenced by imprinted genes, the actual correlations between pairs of siblings  will differ from those expected following classical Mendelian inheritance in a predictable way depending on what  kind of imprinting is influencing the trait and the fit of Mendelian and imprinting models can be compared. The  results of this study support a model of competing maternal and paternal influences on strong and weak  empathy.

Session 31.  Symposium: Evolutionary medicine: challenges and future directions 2. (Pasteur)

Elizabeth Uhl  Expanding the perspective: animal diseases and evolutionary medicine.  An evolutionary perspective is increasingly being embraced in medicine and is now considered essential for a  comprehensive understanding of disease. To date the evolutionary medicine movement has concentrated on the  evolutionary aspects of human disease, however only a very few diseases are truly unique to humans. For  example, for dogs alone, of the 450 reported canine  diseases approximately 360 are analogous to human  diseases. Add this to the fact that many animals live in very close association with humans and thus share  exposure to the same environment, it becomes clear that an integrative knowledge of the evolutionary aspects of  disease can provide a framework that greatly enhances the understanding of human diseases. Extension of the  reach of evolutionary medicine to include animal diseases also opens up a much broader range of experimental  research questions. For example, human gene association studies have identified potential gene targets in a wide  variety of diseases, but the gene manipulation studies required for confirmation and characterization of  phenotypic effects cannot be performed on people. Animal models will therefore be needed for these critical  cause and effect studies. However, although much of what is known about human diseases has been learned  from the study of animal models, the evolutionary influences that molded animal phenotypes and how they may  differ from those influencing humans have rarely been considered in their selection. Because of this,  animal  models have not been fully utilized in studies of disease and the lack of an evolutionary perspective  has  contributed to a serious ‘prediction problem,’ to wit that many of the findings from studying animal models do  not apply to the human disease. In addition, animal models have traditionally been based only upon their  similarities to the human diseases and their differences have either been ignored or considered a weakness. An  evolutionary perspective that considers both humans and experimental animals in the environmental contexts in  which they evolved will make investigations of the differences between the human and animal manifestations of  diseases, especially those with the same etiology, as equally insightful to the understanding human disease as are  interspecies similarities. Such an integrated evolutionary perspective on disease has the potential to provide a  unifying context to the study of disease just as it did for biology and genetics.

Rudi G.J. Westendorp  Selection for human longevity.  Human longevity has long been considered to be beyond evolutionary control. Over recent decades however,  various adaptive theories have been put forward that favour post-reproductive survival in women, enhancing the  reproductive success of their (grand) children. In polygamous populations older men frequently continue to sire  children up to an advanced age. Such an effect may have contributed also to selection for human longevity. From  2002 through 2010 we have prospectively followed 28,994 individuals in 1,703 households from a contemporary  polygamous African population, with a demographic structure and environment that probably resembles our  evolutionary past more closely than recent developed societies. In a full kin analysis, using a two-sex model, we  have assessed the effect of the presence of women and men aged fifty and above on offspring survival and  reproduction in their households. Our results suggest that human longevity evolved predominantly throughselection for longevity in older men, rather than through selection favouring post-reproductive survival in older  women. As survival up to old age under adverse conditions critically depends on fighting infection, these findings  underpin a central role of the (innate-) immune system in regulating longevity and the inverse, the ageing  process. Previously, we have pointed to a immunological trade-off between reproduction and longevity. Now, by  comparing the expression of the (innate-) immune system in an original adverse environment in Ghana and the  nowadays affluent environment in developed countries, we better understand the occurrence of inflammation  mediated age associated diseases such as atherosclerosis, apathy and dementia that are part of our current life  histories.

David van Bodegom, M. Rozing & R. Westendorp  Socioeconomic status determines sex dependent survival of human offspring.  BACKGROUND In polygamous societies, rich men have high reproductive prospects through the marriage of  multiple wives. Evolutionary, rich households would therefore benefit more from sons. RESULTS In a large  polygamous population of 28,994 participants in rural Africa, after eight years of follow-up for survival and  fertility, men in rich households had twice the reproductive prospects of women. In line with evolutionary  expectation; in rich households more sons were born; sons had higher survival and sons had better nutritional  status. CONCLUSIONS These findings could reflect a higher vulnerability of sons to poor conditions. They are also  in line with differences in parental investment as  hypothesized by Trivers and Willard. Irrespective of the  underlying mechanism, the differential survival of sons and daughters dependent on socioeconomic status  maximizes reproductive success in this polygamous society.