"Identifying normal function in abnormal results: Reaction norms lead to a new normal for medical practice"
Joe Alcock
Department of Emergency Medicine
University of New Mexico
Physicians use departures from normal values in vital signs and biomarkers to discriminate between health and disease, often with the goal of restoring values to normal ranges. However, overreliance on abnormal test results can result in overtreatment and medical errors.
"Zoobiquity and evolutionary medicine"
Barbara Natterson - Horowitz, M.D
Division of Cardiology
University of California, Los Angeles
The most common and deadly conditions challenging physicians and patients today are neither uniquely human, nor are they unique to our modern times. We humans do, undoubtedly, amplify the risks of many cancers, cardiovascular and other diseases through our lifestyles and environments.
"Using evolution and ecology to develop universal biomarkers for cancers"
Carlo Maley
School of Life Sciences
Arizona State University
The somatic evolution that drives neoplastic progression and therapeutic resistance has made it difficult to develop reliable biomarkers in cancer. Most biomarkers have been based on the presence, absence or level of a gene or gene product.
"Population genomics of sex chromosome evolution"
Melissa A. Wilson Sayres
School of Life Sciences, Center for Evolution and Medicine
Arizona State University
There is tremendous sexual dimorphism in human genetic disease susceptibility, progression, and drug response. It is thus alarming that most genome-wide association studies exclude the most sexually dimorphic regions of our genome, the sex chromosomes.
"Phenotypes and the fertility of Tibetan women residing at high altitude in Nepal"
Cynthia M. Beall
Anthropology Department
Case Western Reserve University
Reproduction and survival of offspring are central to evolution and adaptation. Understanding how these events play out in real populations is important for understanding the pace at which evolution and adaptation may occur. High-altitude populations are informative in this context because they have adapted to a severe environmental stress.
"Metastatic lineages can arise early and exhibit multiple genetic origins within primary tumors"
Jeffrey Townsend
Department of Biostatistics
Yale University
It has long been understood that tumorigenesis is an evolutionary process associated with the accumulation of somatic mutations. However, many aspects of that process that are fundamental to cancer biology and targeted treatment have been challenging to reveal.
"Variability in maternal cortisol levels during very early gestation is associated with children’s postnatal hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis activity"
Pablo A Nepomnaschy
Faculty of Health Sciences and Human Evolutionary Studies Program
Simon Fraser University
Maternal stress during gestation may affect in utero programming of the stress or hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPAA) with consequences for childdevelopment and subsequent disease susceptibility.
"The evolutionary dynamics of transmissible cancers"
Beata Ujvari
Centre for Integrative Ecology
Deakin University
Transmissible cancers constitute an example of cancer evolution par excellence: processes akin to Darwinian selection drive individual cancer cells along evolutionary landscapes culminating in resistant, invasive, and ultimately immortal cancer phenotypes. The fitness of transmissible cancer cells undeniably surpasses those remaining within, and hence succumbing with their single h
"Diversion hypothesis: how the paternally controlled placenta avoids maternal rejection of invasive trophoblasts and ushers in increased human birth weight and brain size."
Harvey Kliman
Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences
Yale University
Humans have the largest newborn to adult size ratio of all animals.
"Medicine, evolutionary medicine and conceptual change within evolutionary biology"
Tatjana Buklijas
Liggins Institute
University of Auckland
Since the nineteenth century, the relationship between medicine and evolution has gone through peaks and troughs. It depended on the status of Darwinism in science and public life of the day, on fashions in medical education, and was influenced by dominant contemporary ideas about heredity and (the source of) variation.