In 2008 the US National Institute on Aging (of the National Institutes of Health) supported this study on the long-term impact of famine on health using historical data. An extension of the project was awarded by NIA-NIH in 2015. The project is executed in collaboration with Prof. dr. L.H. Lumey (Columbia University, New York). The project uses individual information on 45,000 male subjects born or conceived during various stages of the Dutch Hunger Winter in the first months of 1945 and in periods outside that period. We have information about the medical examination that these subjects underwent when they were selected for military service in the 1960s. We follow these subjects in the national death and population registries to the present day to study their survival and causes of death to test various specific hypotheses on the effect of under-nutrition in utero on later life health.
Additionally we also estimated the war-related (both famine and non-famine) excess mortality during the last stage of the Second World War in the Netherlands (1944-1945).
