WEIRD bodies: mismatch, medicine and missing diversity.

ABSTRACT: Despite recent rapid advances in medical knowledge that have improved survival, conventional medical science's understanding of human health and disease relies heavily on people of European descent living in contemporary urban industrialized environments. Given that modern conditions in high-income countries differ widely in terms of lifestyle and exposures compared to those experienced by billions of people and all our ancestors over several hundred thousand years, this narrow approach to the human body and health is very limiting. We argue that preventing and treating chronic diseases of aging and other mismatch diseases will require both expanding study design to sample diverse populations and contexts, and fully incorporating evolutionary perspectives. In this paper, we first assess th

SUBMITTER: Gurven MD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7584376 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature