Published in Journal of Evolutionary Medicine
Background. Evolutionary medicine, the intersection of evolutionary biology and medical sciences, has grown in the last two decades. However, this new scientific discipline continues to have a limited impact in clinical medicine and medical education. As this field undergoes its own evolution, it has become necessary to better define this area of s...
Published in Journal of Evolutionary Medicine
Background. Consanguineous marriage is strongly favored in many regions of the world, despite the prevalent Western belief that the progeny of close kin unions experience developmental disorders and premature mortality. Objective. We outline an alternative perspective on the association between consanguinity and disease, in terms of life history th...
Published in Journal of Evolutionary Medicine
Biome depletion, or loss of co-evolved constituents within the ecosystem of the human body, has become the leading suspect in epidemics of allergic, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases associated with post-industrial culture. Immunity in wild and laboratory rats has been used as a model for immunity in biome-normal and biome depleted environments,...
Published in Journal of Evolutionary Medicine
Although an increasing number of studies in mammals provide support to the Trivers-Willard prediction, evidence of this phenomenon in human remains controversial. Here, assuming that contemporary humans respond in an ancestral manner to recent improvements of lifestyle, we explored the hypothesis of a facultative adjustment of sex ratio in relation...
Published in Journal of Evolutionary Medicine
Persistence of cancer over evolutionary times is a challenging question for scientists. We explored here the idea that cancer might result from negative trade-offs of adaptations that improve early survival and/or reproductive fitness. We focused on birth weight since this life history trait has a genetic basis and is also associated with fitness b...
Published in Journal of Evolutionary Medicine
Stress and disease. Although psychological stress is an adaptive phenotypic state necessary for survival, chronic psychological stress in developed, industrialized human populations can be characterized as an immune-altering factor associated with a wide range of allergic, autoimmune, and other inflammatory-related diseases. Modern lifestyles, chro...
Published in Journal of Evolutionary Medicine
The alarming spread of antibiotic resistance threatens to turn even the most routine treatments of bacterial infection into a Sisyphean task. This is not only a result of proliferation of antibiotic resistant microbes, but also a consequence of horizontal transmission of resistance genes by mobile genetic elements able to transfer resistance genes ...
Published in Journal of Evolutionary Medicine
Evolutionary principles have been increasingly applied to the health sciences over the past 30 years. The discipline that is emerging from these applications, often referred to as evolutionary medicine, has already provided a better understanding of what disease is and why it occurs, and frameworks for more effective interventions. It emphasizes th...
Published in Journal of Evolutionary Medicine
In summer 2015, the “Evolutionary Medicine Conference 2015: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Human Health and Disease” takes place at the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine, University of Zurich, Switzerland. This international conference is the first of its kind in Europe and brings together eight distinguished keynote speakers from all over the ...
Published in Journal of Evolutionary Medicine
How genetically simple pathogens like HIV overwhelm complex immune systems is not fully understood. One unexplored possibility is that epistatic interactions across genetically complementary quasispecies (i.e., group-level social heterosis) allow pathogens to escape immune suppression. We tested this hypothesis by simulating an " HIV-like " pathoge...
