Edited by R. Michael Roberts, University of Missouri-Columbia, Columbia, MO, and approved August 17, 2010 (received for review July 15, 2010)
At the end of World War II, a severe 5-mo famine struck the cities in the western part of The Netherlands. At its peak, the rations dropped to as low as 400 calories per day. In 1972, cognitive performance in 19-y-old male conscripts was reported not to have been affected by exposure to the famine before birth. In the present study, we show that cognitive function in later life does seem affected by prenatal undernutrition. We found that at age 56 to 59, men and women exposed to famine during the early stage of gestation performed worse on a selective attention task, a cognitive ability that usually declines with increasing age. We hypothesize that this decline may be an early manifestation of an accelerated cognitive aging process.
Author contributions: R.C.P. and T.J.R. designed research; S.R.d.R. and R.C.P. performed research; S.R.d.R., H.W., and J.E.Y. analyzed data; and S.R.d.R., H.W., J.E.Y., R.C.P., and T.J.R. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
See Commentary on page 16757.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1009459107/-/DCSupplemental.
