Developmental Origins of Health and Disease: A Challenge for Nurses

• The Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) framework directs us to a different approach in which the mother-child-family-community is viewed as one continuous unit, with multiple layers of exposure that impact health.
• Using DOHaD, nurses are uniquely poised to impact the health outcomes of multiple generations.
• DOHaD offers a new lens for evaluation of health interventions aimed at disease prevention.
• Disease prevention starts at/before conception; optimizing the health of young girls and women will improve the health of multiple generations.

Prevention of disease is a cornerstone of nursing care. Through our endeavors in research, teaching, and clinical care, nurses consistently seek to change the trajectory of disease development. The theoretical framework known as the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) offers a new lens that shifts the current disease prevention paradigm upstream, encouraging intensified care of pregnant girls/women, neonates, and infants. This new focus parallels other emerging ecobiodevelopmental, life-course theories, which identify the long-term impact of early environments and stressors on the later risk of chronic adult diseases. Nurses have the potential to influence the health of multiple generations by incorporating DOHaD perspectives and interventions into their research and patient care.