Paula Ivey Henry, Meredith R Spence Beaulieu, Angelle Bradford, Joseph L Graves
{"title":"Embedded racism: Inequitable niche construction as a neglected evolutionary process affecting health.","authors":"Paula Ivey Henry, Meredith R Spence Beaulieu, Angelle Bradford, Joseph L Graves","doi":"10.1093/emph/eoad007","DOIUrl":"10.1093/emph/eoad007","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Racial health disparities are a pervasive feature of modern experience and structural racism is increasingly recognized as a public health crisis. Yet evolutionary medicine has not adequately addressed the racialization of health and disease, particularly the systematic embedding of social biases in biological processes leading to disparate health outcomes delineated by socially defined race. In contrast to the sheer dominance of medical publications which still assume genetic 'race' and omit mention of its social construction, we present an alternative biological framework of racialized health. We explore the unifying evolutionary-ecological principle of niche construction as it offers critical insights on internal and external biological and behavioral feedback processes environments at every level of the organization. We Integrate insights of niche construction theory in the context of human evolutionary and social history and phenotype-genotype modification, exposing the extent to which racism is an evolutionary mismatch underlying inequitable disparities in disease. We then apply ecological models of niche exclusion and exploitation to institutional and interpersonal racial constructions of population and individual health and demonstrate how discriminatory processes of health and harm apply to evolutionarily relevant disease classes and life-history processes in which socially defined race is poorly understood and evaluated. Ultimately, we call for evolutionary and biomedical scholars to recognize the salience of racism as a pathogenic process biasing health outcomes studied across disciplines and to redress the neglect of focus on research and application related to this crucial issue.</p>","PeriodicalId":12156,"journal":{"name":"Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health","volume":"11 1","pages":"112-125"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2023-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10184440/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9480128","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Z M Thayer, S A Geisel-Zamora, G Uwizeye, T E Gildner
{"title":"Childbirth fear in the USA during the COVID-19 pandemic: key predictors and associated birth outcomes.","authors":"Z M Thayer, S A Geisel-Zamora, G Uwizeye, T E Gildner","doi":"10.1093/emph/eoad006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/emph/eoad006","url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Background and objectives: </strong>Childbirth fear, which has been argued to have an adaptive basis, exists on a spectrum. Pathologically high levels of childbirth fear is a clinical condition called tokophobia. As a chronic stressor in pregnancy, tokophobia could impact birth outcomes. Many factors associated with tokophobia, including inadequate labor support, were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.</p><p><strong>Methodology: </strong>We used longitudinally collected data from a convenience sample of 1775 pregnant persons in the USA to evaluate the association between general and COVID-19 pandemic-related factors and tokophobia using the fear of birth scale. We also assessed associations between tokophobia, low birth weight and preterm birth when adjusting for cesarean section and other covariates among a subset of participants (<i>N</i> = 993).</p><p><strong>Results: </strong>Tokophobia was highly prevalent (62%). Mothers who self-identified as Black (odds ratio (OR) = 1.90), had lower income (OR = 1.39), had less education (OR = 1.37), had a high-risk pregnancy (OR = 1.65) or had prenatal depression (OR = 4.95) had significantly higher odds of tokophobia. Concerns about how COVID-19 could negatively affect maternal and infant health and birth experience were also associated with tokophobia (ORs from 1.51 to 1.79). Tokophobia was significantly associated with increased odds of giving birth preterm (OR = 1.93).</p><p><strong>Conclusions and implications: </strong>Tokophobia increases the odds of preterm birth and is more prevalent among individuals who are Black, have a lower income, and have less education. Tokophobia may, therefore, be an underappreciated contributor to inequities in US birth outcomes. The COVID-19 pandemic likely compounded these effects.</p>","PeriodicalId":12156,"journal":{"name":"Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health","volume":"11 1","pages":"101-111"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10114526/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9444337","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An evolutionary perspective on social inequality and health disparities: Insights from the producer-scrounger game.","authors":"Jonathan C K Wells","doi":"10.1093/emph/eoad026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/emph/eoad026","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>There is growing concern with social disparities in health, whether relating to gender, ethnicity, caste, socio-economic position or other axes of inequality. Despite addressing inequality, evolutionary biologists have had surprisingly little to say on why human societies are prone to demonstrating exploitation. This article builds on a recent book, '<i>The Metabolic Ghetto</i>', describing an overarching evolutionary framework for studying all forms of social inequality involving exploitation. The dynamic 'producer-scrounger' game, developed to model social foraging, assumes that some members of a social group produce food, and that others scrounge from them. An evolutionary stable strategy emerges when neither producers nor scroungers can increase their Darwinian fitness by changing strategy. This approach puts food systems central to all forms of human inequality, and provides a valuable lens through which to consider different forms of gender inequality, socio-economic inequality and racial/caste discrimination. Individuals that routinely adopt producer or scrounger tactics may develop divergent phenotypes. This approach can be linked with life history theory to understand how social dynamics drive health disparities. The framework differs from previous evolutionary perspectives on inequality, by focussing on the exploitation of foraging effort rather than inequality in ecological resources themselves. Health inequalities emerge where scroungers acquire different forms of power over producers, driving increasing exploitation. In racialized societies, symbolic categorization is used to systematically assign some individuals to low-rank producer roles, embedding exploitation in society. Efforts to reduce health inequalities must address the whole of society, altering producer-scrounger dynamics rather than simply targeting resources at exploited groups.</p>","PeriodicalId":12156,"journal":{"name":"Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health","volume":"11 1","pages":"294-308"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10482145/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10559791","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Double trouble: trypanosomatids with two hosts have lower infection prevalence than single host trypanosomatids.","authors":"Hawra Al-Ghafli, Seth M Barribeau","doi":"10.1093/emph/eoad014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/emph/eoad014","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Trypanosomatids are a diverse family of protozoan parasites, some of which cause devastating human and livestock diseases. There are two distinct infection life cycles in trypanosomatids; some species complete their entire life cycle in a single host (monoxenous) while others infect two hosts (dixenous). Dixenous trypanosomatids are mostly vectored by insects, and the human trypanosomatid diseases are caused mainly by vectored parasites. While infection prevalence has been described for subsets of hosts and trypanosomatids, little is known about whether monoxenous and dixenous trypanosomatids differ in infection prevalence. Here, we use meta-analyses to synthesise all published evidence of trypanosomatid infection prevalence for the last two decades, encompassing 931 unique host-trypansomatid systems. In examining 584 studies that describe infection prevalence, we find, strikingly, that monoxenous species are two-fold more prevalent than dixenous species across all hosts. We also find that dixenous trypanosomatids have significantly lower infection prevalence in insects than their non-insect hosts. To our knowledge, these results reveal for the first time, a fundamental difference in infection prevalence according to host specificity where vectored species might have lower infection prevalence as a result of a potential 'jack of all trades, master of none' style trade-off between the vector and subsequent hosts.</p>","PeriodicalId":12156,"journal":{"name":"Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health","volume":"11 1","pages":"202-218"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10317189/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9802537","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ralph Catalano, Tim A Bruckner, Alison Gemmill, Joan A Casey, Claire Margerison, Terry Hartig
{"title":"A novel indicator of selection <i>in utero</i>.","authors":"Ralph Catalano, Tim A Bruckner, Alison Gemmill, Joan A Casey, Claire Margerison, Terry Hartig","doi":"10.1093/emph/eoad018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/emph/eoad018","url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Background and objectives: </strong>Selection <i>in utero</i> predicts that population stressors raise the standard for how quickly fetuses must grow to avoid spontaneous abortion. Tests of this prediction must use indirect indicators of fetal loss in birth cohorts because vital statistics systems typically register fetal deaths at the 20th week of gestation or later, well after most have occurred. We argue that tests of selection <i>in utero</i> would make greater progress if researchers adopted an indicator of selection against slow-growing fetuses that followed from theory, allowed sex-specific tests and used readily available data. We propose such an indicator and assess its validity as a dependent variable by comparing its values among monthly birth cohorts before, and during, the first 10 months of the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden.</p><p><strong>Methodology: </strong>We apply Box-Jenkins methods to 50 pre-pandemic birth cohorts (i.e., December 2016 through January 2020) and use the resulting transfer functions to predict counterfactual values in our suggested indicator for selection for ten subsequent birth cohorts beginning in February 2020. We then plot all 60 residual values as well as their 95% detection interval. If birth cohorts in gestation at the onset of the pandemic lost more slow-growing fetuses than expected from history, more than one of the last 10 (i.e. pandemic-exposed) residuals would fall below the detection interval.</p><p><strong>Results: </strong>Four of the last 10 residuals of our indicator for males and for females fell below the 95% detection interval.</p><p><strong>Conclusions and implications: </strong>Consistent with selection <i>in utero</i>, Swedish birth cohorts in gestation at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic included fewer than expected infants who grew slowly <i>in utero</i>.</p>","PeriodicalId":12156,"journal":{"name":"Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health","volume":"11 1","pages":"244-250"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10360163/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9867158","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Using evolutionary principles to make clinical decisions: a case series of urinary tract infections.","authors":"Michelle Blyth","doi":"10.1093/emph/eoad021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/emph/eoad021","url":null,"abstract":"The principles of evolutionary medicine have significant potential to be useful in a wide variety of clinical situations. Despite this, few demonstrations of clinical applications exist. To address this paucity, a case series applying evolutionary medicine principles to urinary tract infections, a common medical condition is presented. This series demonstrates how applying evolutionary medicine principles can be used to augment clinical decision-making.","PeriodicalId":12156,"journal":{"name":"Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health","volume":"11 1","pages":"287-293"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10465264/pdf/eoad021.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10128301","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Arnaud Tognetti, Megan N Williams, Nathalie Lybert, Mats Lekander, John Axelsson, Mats J Olsson
{"title":"Humans can detect axillary odor cues of an acute respiratory infection in others.","authors":"Arnaud Tognetti, Megan N Williams, Nathalie Lybert, Mats Lekander, John Axelsson, Mats J Olsson","doi":"10.1093/emph/eoad016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/emph/eoad016","url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Background and objectives: </strong>Body odor conveys information about health status to conspecifics and influences approach-avoidance behaviors in animals. Experiments that induce sickness in otherwise healthy individuals suggest that humans too can detect sensory cues to infection in others. Here, we investigated whether individuals could detect through smell a naturally occurring acute respiratory infection in others and whether sickness severity, measured via body temperature and sickness symptoms, was associated with the accuracy of detection.</p><p><strong>Methodology: </strong>Body odor samples were collected from 20 donors, once while healthy and once while sick with an acute respiratory infection. Using a double-blind, two-alternative forced-choice method, 80 raters were instructed to identify the sick body odor from paired sick and healthy samples (i.e. 20 pairs).</p><p><strong>Results: </strong>Sickness detection was significantly above chance, although the magnitude of the effect was low (56.7%). Raters' sex and disgust sensitivity were not associated with the accuracy of sickness detection. However, we find some indication that greater change in donor body temperature, but not sickness symptoms, between sick and healthy conditions improved sickness detection accuracy.</p><p><strong>Conclusion and implications: </strong>Our findings suggest that humans can detect individuals with an acute respiratory infection through smell, albeit only slightly better than chance. Humans, similar to other animals, are likely able to use sickness odor cues to guide adaptive behaviors that decrease the risk of contagion, such as social avoidance. Further studies should determine how well humans can detect specific infections through body odor, such as Covid-19, and how multisensory cues to infection are used simultaneously.</p>","PeriodicalId":12156,"journal":{"name":"Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health","volume":"11 1","pages":"219-228"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10324639/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9810684","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Evobiopsychosocial medicine.","authors":"Adam D Hunt, Paul St-John Smith, Riadh Abed","doi":"10.1093/emph/eoac041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/emph/eoac041","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The biopsychosocial model remains the de facto framework of current healthcare, but lacks causational depth, scientific rigour, or any recognition of the importance of evolutionary theory for understanding health and disease. In this article it is updated to integrate Tinbergen's four questions with the three biopsychosocial levels. This 'evobiopsychosocial' schema provides a more complete framework for understanding causation of medical conditions. Its application is exemplified by tabulating depression, rheumatoid arthritis and COVID-19 within its format, which highlights the direct research and practical applications uniquely offered by evolutionary medicine. An evobiopsychosocial framework can serve as a useful tool to introduce evolutionary concepts into mainstream medicine by highlighting the broad and specific contributions of evolutionary analysis to researching, treating and preventing health conditions, providing a suitable next step for the mainstream model of medicine.</p>","PeriodicalId":12156,"journal":{"name":"Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health","volume":"11 1","pages":"67-77"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10026618/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9167418","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"First impressions of a new face are shaped by infection concerns.","authors":"Paola Bressan","doi":"10.1093/emph/eoad025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/emph/eoad025","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Along with a classical immune system, we have evolved a behavioral one that directs us away from potentially contagious individuals. Here I show, using publicly available cross-cultural data, that this adaptation is so fundamental that our first impressions of a male stranger are largely driven by the perceived health of his face. Positive (likeable, capable, intelligent, trustworthy) and negative (unfriendly, ignorant, lazy) first impressions are affected by facial health in adaptively different ways, inconsistent with a mere halo effect; they are also modulated by one's current state of health and inclination to feel disgusted by pathogens. These findings, which replicated across two countries as different as the USA and India, suggest that instinctive perceptions of badness and goodness from faces are not two sides of the same coin but reflect the (nonsymmetrical) expected costs and benefits of interaction. Apparently, pathogens run the show-and first impressions come second. <b>Lay Summary:</b> Our first impressions of strangers (whether they seem trustworthy, intelligent, unfriendly, or aggressive) are shaped by how healthy their faces look and by our unconscious motivation to avoid infections. Bad and good impressions turn out to reflect the concrete, potentially vital, expected costs and benefits of interacting with our fellow humans. Apparently, pathogens run the show-and first impressions come second.</p>","PeriodicalId":12156,"journal":{"name":"Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health","volume":"11 1","pages":"309-315"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10497071/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10316262","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Magnus Aspenberg, Sara Maad Sasane, Fredrik Nilsson, Sam P Brown, Kristofer Wollein Waldetoft
{"title":"Hygiene may attenuate selection for antibiotic resistance by changing microbial community structure.","authors":"Magnus Aspenberg, Sara Maad Sasane, Fredrik Nilsson, Sam P Brown, Kristofer Wollein Waldetoft","doi":"10.1093/emph/eoac038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/emph/eoac038","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Good hygiene, in both health care and the community, is central to containing the rise of antibiotic resistance, as well as to infection control more generally. But despite the well-known importance, the ecological mechanisms by which hygiene (or other transmission control measures) affect the evolution of resistance remain to be elucidated. Using metacommunity ecology theory, we here propose that hygiene attenuates the effect of antibiotic selection pressure. Specifically, we predict that hygiene limits the scope for antibiotics to induce competitive release of resistant bacteria within treated hosts, and that this is due to an effect of hygiene on the distribution of resistant and sensitive strains in the host population. We show this in a mathematical model of bacterial metacommunity dynamics, and test the results against data on antibiotic resistance, antibiotic treatment, and the use of alcohol-based hand rub in long-term care facilities. The data are consistent with hand rub use attenuating the resistance promoting effect of antibiotic treatment. Our results underscore the importance of hygiene, and point to a concrete way to weaken the link between antibiotic use and increasing resistance.</p>","PeriodicalId":12156,"journal":{"name":"Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health","volume":"11 1","pages":"1-7"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9847546/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10574271","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}