Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine Quotes

“Understanding and improving health and well-being in contemporary populations cannot be accomplished through the narrow lens of the present.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“...cancer is not a disease of -modern- times, but environmental changes can shift tissue-specific cancer risks. However, the overall consensus, in both fields of palaeo-oncology and evolutionary medicine, has been that cancer prevalence in human societies has increased significantly in the most recent period of our history, suggesting support for the evolutionary mismatch hypothesis.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“Cancer if often referred to as a -disease of modernity-, suggesting that recent lifestyle and environmental factors are mostly responsible for this disease burden. However, comparative data on cancer prevalence suggests that the disease is evolutionarily ancient and has been a health issue for almost all multicellular animals.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“Cancer is often referred to as a -disease of modernity-, suggesting that recent lifestyle and environmental factors are mostly responsible for this disease burden. However, comparative data on cancer prevalence suggests that the disease is evolutionarily ancient and has been a health issue for almost all multicellular animals.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“Human societies can reshape many environmental components at rapid rates, including (but not limited to) migration into new ecologies/landscapes with novel pathogens and UV exposure, introduction to novel foods, inhaling carcinogens through smoking, pollution from industrialisation, increase in energetic consumption and demographic transitions that impact fertility rates.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“Novel environments may contribute to cancer risk in human and nonhuman populations. In evolutionary medicine, this concept is called evolutionary mismatch and corresponds to when the environment/ecology changes faster than the population can adapt.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“Cancer is a threat to almost all multicellular species across the tree of life, and neoplastic formation has been a persistent selective pressure since the dawn of multicellularity.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“Cancer progression is a complex process that develops across many years of an individual's life. It is not aging, per say, that leads to cancer, but the relationship between aging, the accumulation of mutations and the tissue the microenvironment that harbours potentially mutant cells.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“The term -stress- is almost always used to refer to a negative stimulus but increases in cortisol also occur during positive and beneficial experiences, such as mating and exercise. Cortisol serves other functions across the soma, including in energy metabolism. Therefore, accurately interpreting changes in cortisol levels requiere knowledge of context, perception and activity levels.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“While some parasites species have infected humans in nearly all of their environments, such as the soil-transmitted helminths, others are very much related to specific environmental changes that we have created.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“Just like trauma has a long evolutionary history, we suggest that the treatment of the resulting injuries is also a part of our evolution.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“The dramatic changes that occurred in the relationships between humans and animals as societies transitioned from hunting and foraging to herding and farming, and from living in rural to urban and industrialized environments, had major impacts on pathogen evolution. The development, spread and intensification of agriculture, coupled with urbanization and increased connectivity through trade, enhanced opportunities for pathogens to be shared. Populations of potential hosts, human and animal, were increasingly crowded together often in unsanitary environments. These conditions drove pathogen transmission and virulence because they facilitated transmission from heavily infected and very sick individuals.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“The practice of caring for oneself is common today, and evolutionary approaches suggest self-care may even pre-date anatomically modern humans who evolved over 150,000 years ago.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“The factors facilitating the global emergence of pathogens shared between humans and animals are of particular importance because the diseases they induce have had major impacts on both human and animal health. This transfer of pathogens has ocurred for thousands, if not millions, of years and continues today.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“Our species has co-evolved alongside many others to which we were in contact, especially through scavenging, hunting, and then animal husbandry, all of which would have exposed us to novel pathogens and zoonotic diseases. As a species, we had to adapt to these new pathogens without the benefits of modern medicine. The newly emerging diseases of recent decades, while novel in themselves, are but a repeat of patterns which humans have survived over several millennia.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“Today there are almost eight billion people on earth, crowded together and travelling widely -this is 1300 times more than were present when the agricultural revolution began around 10,000 years ago and facilitated the spread of many pathogens.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“Humans have always lived surrounded by potential pathogens. Whether they co-exist relatively harmlessly or become a problem, cause acute or chronic disease and spread slowly or in epidemics has been, and still is, influenced by how we have impacted the environments we share with other animals. Pathogens are opportunists within these environments, capable and ready to take advantage of anything that promotes their transmission.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“Understanding and improving health and well-being in contemporary populations cannot be accomplished through the narrow lens of the present.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“Identification of environments throughout human history that have aided parasite transmission, as well as social or cultural practices that have contributed to infections, can help inform approaches that could be taken to mitigate infections today.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“Once industrialisation ocurred, non-communicable (chronic) diseases (NCDs; e.g., cancers, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cardio-vascular, and non-infectious respiratory diseases) started to rise and replace infections. Tobacco use, physical inactivity, unhealthy diets and the harmful use of alcohol are key risk factors for NCDs.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“During the initial agricultural -revolution-, people began to cultivate cereals, rice and other plants. They settled into permanent dwellings to tend crops and led more sedentary lifestyles. Some early agriculturalists decreased the breadth of their diet, incorporated more carbohydrates and lived in larger communities, where diseases could spread more easily.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“In fact, the antimicrobial properties of saliva are why it is thought that animals have a natural instinct to lick wounds.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“Humans are characterised by developmental plasticity, an adaptation that allows for survival in geographically or temporally variable ecological conditions, but survival at one age may at a cost to health at later ages.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“Specifically, obligate bipedalism has long been suspected to be an important aetiological factor for acquired spinal diseases that afflict our species because of the types of stresses it puts on our spines.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“Diet has played a role in the evolutionary success of our species and the diversity of local diets exploited may be a key to a health strategy in adapting to local environments.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“Human dietary variation, including our ability to intensify carbohydrate-rich resources, is known to be a key evolutionary strenght. Diet and environment are key drivers of our evolutionay past, and a transition to agriculture among many populations worldwide has had far-reaching implications for our foodways and health.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“Direct comparison of diet and behaviour between species is strongest between Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“The research on palaeodiets also sheds light on how contemporary, so-called "palaeodiets" are generally unscientific and limited (if not erroneous) in their health recommendations, given the wealth of data on the dietary diversity of our evolutionary history.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“The human skeleton differs in many ways from those of the great apes, and some of the differences are in regions commonly afflicted by acquired conditions.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“The human skeleton differs in many ways from those of the great apes, and some of the differences are in regions commonly afflicted bu acquired conditions.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach