Early life 1000 days: opportunities for preventing adult diseases

With the rapid socioeconomic development, improvements in living standards, and changes in lifestyle, adult diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), hypertension, obesity, and so on, are increasing dramatically over the past decades, which have caused a huge economic and health burden at both population and individual levels in China.[1] The increased burden of adult diseases has become the main public health issue, and prevention of adult diseases in China has become a formidable task during recent years. In 2016, China has put forward the concept of whole life-course health and efforts have been made on shifting the focus from treating diseases to prevention. In view of the poor effects of prevention of diseases in adulthood, it is suggested that prevention and management of adult diseases should be extended to early life, which is the critical window for physiological programming and has profound and enduring effects on the whole life-cycle health.[2,3,4] In 2018, an article named "To Prevent Cardiovascular Disease, Pay Attention to Pregnancy Complications" published in Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) also illustrated that pregnancy is a window to future health[5].