Researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine used the setting of the man-made Ukrainian Holodomor famine of 1932-1933 to examine the relation between prenatal famine and adult Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). They studied 128,225 Type 2 diabetes cases diagnosed between 2000-2008 among 10,186,016 male and female Ukrainians born between 1930 and 1938. Individuals who were exposed in early gestation to the famine had a more than two-fold likelihood of developing Type 2 diabetes compared to those unexposed to the famine, according to a study led by Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.
The results are published in the journal Science. The famine led to 4 million excess deaths in the short-term and losses were concentrated in a 6 month period. The Holodomor far exceeded other famines in terms of its intensity.
Life expectancies at birth in 1933 were only 7.2 years for females and 4.3 for males.
The Ukraine setting provided an unusual opportunity to investigate the long-term impact of the Holodomor -- or death by hunger --on Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) cases diagnosed seven decades after prenatal famine exposure. With the famine concentrated in a six-month period in early 1933, we are able to pinpoint the timing of famine together with extreme variations in intensity across provinces." L.
H. Lumey, MD, Professor of Epidemiology at Columbia Publ.