AnorexiaThe discussion is short but sweet (and as the paper is free full text, I encourage you to take a look from the link in the first paragraph).What these sorts of results show us is that early life and the neonatal period can plausibly be a time when suboptimal environments can eventually show up as disease later in life.Apparently there was a finding recently that an interaction between a dopamine receptor gene and season of birth influences body weight regulation in women with bulimia (1), which is also intriguing.
The problem with season-of-birth research - pregnancy is 9 months long, and obviously development occurs during all of that time, with vulnerable developmental windows of different sorts opening at different times all during the gestation. The environmental factors that could affect a seasonal change include maternal nutrition, sunlight, vitamin D, stress, temperature, and infectious disease (you can probably think of a few more).Here is a quote from the study that encapsulates my thoughts on the vitamin D issue:Interestingly, vitamin D levels have been shown to be associated with psychiatric disorders. Although the presence of low vitamin D levels in people with psychiatric illness may be the consequence of reverse causation, further support for a role of vitamin D comes from functional studies showing that it is also involved in neuroprotection and brain development.
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