Popular Science | Feb. 19, 2014
A Cambodian case study finds that people developing diabetes today have parents who went hungry in the 1970s.
So many adults in Cambodia are getting diabetes at such a young age, it’s unbelievable. “You can go to every village with me and see it,” endocrinologist Lim Keuky told PRI. “When I go abroad to developed countries, people say I’m lying. I’m not lying.”
Cambodians are getting type 2—A.K.A. adult-onset—diabetes in their late 30s. In contrast, the average age of diagnosis in the U.S. is 54. Sure, Cambodians now eat more and do less physical work than they did in decades past. But that’s not enough to explain their unusual diabetes rates, PRI reports. Something else is happening.
This new generation of diabetes patients was conceived and born during the Khmer Rouge regime, between 1975 and 1979. Scientists think their prenatal exposure to their mothers’ starvation set them up for diabetes later in life. Plus, while the PRI story doesn’t explicitly say so, it seems scientists think there may be an epigenetic effect going on, too. That is, being a fetus in a starving mother actually altered these people’s DNA in a way that may be inherited by their own children.
