ESPE Yearbook of Paediatric Endocrinology

Brief summary: In this paper introduced a new energy trade-off score (ETOS) and index to characterize four extreme human body types regarding height and weight in young adulthood (e.g. tall-slender, short-stout, short-slender, tall-stout) for growth patterns and underlying genetic background. Growth data of 1889 subjects (996 girls) of the GrowUp 1974 Gothenburg study were investigated for the four body types showing that the two trade-off body types tall-slender and short-stout differed in height, weight, BMI and ETOS and mirrored each other. While BMI trajectories for the trade-off groups increased or decreased constantly over time, ETOS trajectories showed phasic changes suggesting a specific role of energy trade-off during infancy and puberty. GWAS were run for ETOS, height and BMI using data extracted from the UK Biobank and yielded several genes that have been previously been associated with changes in weight and/or height. Several loci were found strongly associated with ETOS, and comprised genes were enriched in pathways of metabolism, chromatin organization, regulation of PTEN and WNT signaling.

The trade-off theory states that, in human evolution, changes in two energy consuming traits are competing, meaning that they come at a cost to each other. Examples of this include early reproduction, which comes at the cost of shorter height and increased BMI, or the inverse trade-off between weight and height with undernutrition and overnutrition. The introduction of a new ETOS and distinct body types allows now to interrogate existing data for this theory not only to find growth patterns and time windows where ETO is most effective, but also to identify its underlying genetic basis and (disease) mechanisms. In the future, this might help to identify people at risk earlier and provide them with more specific treatments.

This paper, published in April 2023, is the most recent of the 280 PubMed cited papers of Ze’ev Hochberg. It shows that he was involved in research projects addressing the most important questions of today’s human health and medicine using the newest approaches and providing excellent analytical expertise.