The Placenta and Human Developmental Programming

The size, shape and thickness of the placental surface
at birth strongly predict cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis and cancer in later life. These findings suggest
that variations in normal placental development lead
to fetal undernutrition and hypoxia, and subsequently
programme chronic disease. The development of the
placenta will be dependent on the mother’s nutritional
state, but will also be influenced by the processes of
decidualization, allocation of cells to the trophectoderm lineage in the pre-implantation embryo, implantation of the blastocyst, trophoblast remodelling of the
spiral arteries, growth of the placental villous tree and
expression of transporter proteins in the villous membrane. In view of these new important epidemiological
findings there is now an urgent need for research into
the regulation of placental development in humans.