The Developmental Origins of Irritable Bowel Syndrome: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.

Objectives: The Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) framework contends that chronic diseases are attributable to behavioral and environmental risks encountered during vital periods of fetal and childhood development. Clinical research investigating irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) largely focuses on adult risk factors, with emerging evidence of epigenetic contributions. Limited work considers potential childhood exposures.

Religious Involvement Is Associated With Higher Fertility and Lower Maternal Investment, but More Alloparental Support Among Gambian Mothers.

Objectives: Human childrearing is cooperative, with women often able to achieve relatively high fertility through help from many individuals. Previous work has documented tremendous socioecological variation in who supports women in childrearing, but less is known about the intracultural correlates of variation in allomaternal support. In the highly religious, high-fertility setting of The Gambia, we studied whether religious mothers have more children and receive more support with their children.

Correction: Betel quid use is associated with anemia among both men and women in Matlab, Bangladesh.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgph.

A practical guide to cross-cultural and multi-sited data collection in the biological and behavioural sciences.

Researchers in the biological and behavioural sciences are increasingly conducting collaborative, multi-sited projects to address how phenomena vary across ecologies. These types of projects, however, pose additional workflow challenges beyond those typically encountered in single-sited projects. Through specific attention to cross-cultural research projects, we highlight four key aspects of multi-sited projects that must be considered during the design phase to ensure success: (1) project and team management; (2) protocol and instrument development; (3) data management and documentation; and (4) equitable and collaborative practices.

Women's subsistence strategies predict fertility across cultures, but context matters.

While it is commonly assumed that farmers have higher, and foragers lower, fertility compared to populations practicing other forms of subsistence, robust supportive evidence is lacking. We tested whether subsistence activities-incorporating market integration-are associated with fertility in 10,250 women from 27 small-scale societies and found considerable variation in fertility. This variation did not align with group-level subsistence typologies.