Babies genes explain birth weight and later life disease read more at here www.spinonews.com/index.php/item/1063-babies-genes-explain-birth-weight-and-later-life-disease

New research finds genetic differences help to explain why some babies are born bigger or smaller than others. It also reveals how genetic differences provide an important link between an individual's early growth and their chances of developing conditions, such as Type-2 diabetes or heart disease in later life.

The new study was jointly led by a team of researchers from universities of Exeter, Oxford, Bristol, Cambridge and Queensland, and the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam. The research concluded that a substantial proportion of the variation in birth weight is down to genetic differences between babies.

Dr. Rachel Freathy, a Sir Henry Dale Fellow at the University of Exeter Medical School, said, this study has revealed how the small genetic differences between individuals can collectively have quite large effects on birth weight, and how those same genetic differences are often linked to poor health in later life.

Many decades later babies average weight has a markedly increased risk of diabetes. Until now, researchers have assumed that link reflects the long-term impact of the nutritional environment in which the fetus develops.

In this new study, the researchers uncovered a substantial overlap in the genetic regions linked to differences in birth weight and those are connected to a higher risk of developing diabetes or heart disease.

Most of this overlap involves the baby's genetic profile, but the team found that the mother's genes also played an important role in influencing her baby's birth weight, most likely through the ways in which they alter the baby's environment during pregnancy.

Researchers analyzed genetic differences throughout the genomes of nearly 1,54,000 people from across the world. By matching the genetic profiles of these people to information on birth weight, they identify sixty regions of the genome that were clearly driving differences in birth weight.

These results point to the key role played by genetic differences in connecting variation in early growth to future risk of disease.