Alejandra Nuñez-de la Mora

University of Veracruz | UV · Instituto de Investigaciones Psicológicas

Recent studies in social endocrinology have explored the effects of social relationships on female reproductive steroid hormones—estradiol and progesterone—investigating whether they are suppressed in partnered and parous women. Results have been mixed for these hormones although evidence is more consistent that partnered women and women with young...

Introduction In Coatepec, Mexico, the immediate postpartum is considered a special time, called the cuarentena, when postpartum women receive critical social support and observe diet and activity pre- and proscriptions—all intended to enhance maternal-child health. This study examined how public health mandates aimed at containing COVID-19, which i...

El objetivo de este trabajo fue caracterizar la producción científica en Latinoamérica sobre la relación de la seguridad alimentaria (SA) con indi-cadores de salud y estado nutricional. Se realizó una revisión documental y se localizaron estudios en las bases electrónicas PubMed, Google Académico y SciELO. Se emplearon los vocablos: “seguridad” “al...

El desarrollo de las funciones ejecutivas, que tienen un papel importante en el aprendizaje y la adaptación de un individuo, ha sido descrito a partir de poblaciones urbanas; sin embargo, poco se sabe del desempeño de un niño o una niña que se desarrolla en un contexto rural con características socioeconómicas, culturales y ecológicas distintas. El...

In traditional polycultures such as milpas, soil degradation and the loss of agrodiversity, threaten rural food security. Although agroecological management using crop functional and genetic diversity could improve soil fertility and family nutrition, experimental evidence is scarce. We conducted a field experiment in which conventional agricultura...

Objective Academic human biology seeks to characterize and explain human biocultural variation in terms of adaptations to local environments. Understanding and educating about such variation, if not carried out thoughtfully, can reinforce power asymmetries around who can produce and access the knowledge, and in what ways and places. One of many fac...

El objetivo de este estudio fue determinar, mediante la perspectiva teórica de las representaciones sociales (RS), los conocimientos de sentido común construidos por mujeres adultas que viven en situación de pobreza, respecto a la salud de sus hijos, con el fin de generar evidencia útil en el diseño de intervenciones cultural y socialmente relevant...

Introduction While many aspects of female ovarian function respond to environmental stressors, estradiol (E2) appears less sensitive to stressors than progesterone, except under extreme ecological conditions. However, earlier studies relied on saliva samples, considered less sensitive than blood. Here, we investigated E2 variation among 177 Banglad...

Objectives: The skin, as well as its microbial communities, serves as the primary interface between the human body and the surrounding environment. In order to implement the skin microbiome into human biology research, there is a need to explore the effects of different sample collection and storage methodologies, including the feasibility of cond...

March Mammal Madness is a science outreach project that, over the course of several weeks in March, reaches hundreds of thousands of people in the United States every year. We combine four approaches to science outreach – gamification, social media platforms, community event(s), and creative products – to run a simulated tournament in which 64 anim...

This study contributes to the sparse literature on the infant skin microbiome in general, and the virtually nonexistent literature on the infant skin microbiome in a field setting. While microbiome research often addresses patterns at a national scale, this study addresses the influence of population-level factors, such as maternal socioeconomic st...

Background Adrenarche involves maturation of the hypothalamic‐pituitary‐adrenal axis and increased production of dehydroepiandrosterone and its sulfate ester, dehydroepiandrosterone‐sulfate (DHEA‐S). It occurs at ages 6 to 8 in industrialized populations, marking the transition from childhood to juvenility and cognitive development at middle childh...

Objectives: This study aims to assess the secular trend in age at menarche (AAM) in Mexico over the 20th century, and compare the patterns according to area of residence (rural/urban), socioeconomic status (SES), and ethnicity (indigenous/nonindigenous). Methods: Data on AAM from 24 380 women aged ≥20 years born between 1906 and 1986 were obtain...

Background: Maize in Mexico exhibits great genetic diversity, maintained by traditional practices of indigenous and non-indigenous communities, the same practices that have led to crop diversification over centuries. As one of the main staple crops worldwide, safeguarding the genetic diversity of maize is paramount to food security. Aims: This stu...

Phaseolus dumosus is an endemic species from mountain tops in Mexico that was found in traditional agriculture areas in Veracruz, Mexico. P. dumosus plants were identified by ITS sequences and their nodules were collected from agricultural fields or from trap plant experiments in the laboratory. Bacteria from P. dumosus nodules were identified as b...

*Full forum is in Spanish. English Abstract: Interview with the coordinators of the DeMano project, who work with multidisciplinary perspectives of food insecurity in milpa-producing families in Ocotepec, Mexico. We talk about their achievements and the challenges for programs oriented to developing skills for both raising children and women’s empo...

Variation in male testosterone has been hypothesized to reflect the evolved hormonal regulation of investment in mating versus parenting effort. Supporting this hypothesis, numerous studies have observed lower testosterone in married men and fathers compared with unpartnered and childless men, consistent with relatively elevated resource allocation...

According to life history theory, increased investment in reproductive function (physiology and behaviour) at different times throughout the life course affects the risk of many diseases and, ultimately, longevity. Although genetic factors contribute to interindividual and interpopulation variation in reproductive traits, the dominant source of var...

La ecología reproductiva humana (ERH) es un campo de la biología evolutiva que estudia la reproducción humana en el contexto de la ecología en la que se desarrollan y viven los individuos y las poblaciones. A diferencia de otras disciplinas que tratan con la reproducción humana, la ERH tiene como objetivo principal generar modelos que expliquen la...

Human reproductive ecology (HRE) studies human reproduction in the context of local ecological variables. The perspective of HRE is evolutionary, and its central goal is to provide models for explaining variation in reproductive patterns as adaptations to the environment. Reproductive function shows significant variation between and within individu...

In the UK, immigrant women from developing countries are more likely to initiate breastfeeding and sustain it for longer periods than women in the nonimmigrant white population. This desirable pattern, however, is being eroded among UK-born generations where incidence and duration of lactation are significantly lower than in first-generation immigr...

Experiments on birds, fish and mammals have shown that adverse conditions during infancy can produce diverse long‐term and delayed deficits during adulthood, prejudicing both the individual and its offspring. Natural selection should prepare animals to cope with adversity of the type, magnitude and timing that commonly occur in their natural habita...

A survey of the helminth fauna of the blue-footed booby, Sula nebouxii, on Isla Isabel, off the Pacific coast of México, is presented. Eight parasite species were found: 4 digeneans (Galactosomum puffini , Mesostephanus microbursa, Opisthometra planicollis, and Renicola thapari), 3 nematodes (Contracaecum sp., Porrocaecum sp., and Tetrameres sp.),...

It is well known that testosterone (T) influences the expression of the behavior and many sexual traits during reproduction in vertebrates. However, patterns of circulating concentrations of T vary tremendously across free-living populations. Here the profiles of plasma T levels in the Magnificent Frigatebird, Fregata magnificens, are presented dur...

In the blue-footed booby (Sula nebouxii), the first-hatched chick aggressively dominates its sibling and sometimes kills it when food is in short supply. To investigate the endocrine correlates of dominance-subordinance and hunger-induced agonism, we deprived 15-20-d-old single-chick and two-chick broods of food during 48 h by taping chicks' necks...

Introduction Type 2 diabetes is one of the most important health problems faced by the world today. It accounts for 85 to 95% of diabetes in populations worldwide,1 arising from a combination of resistance to the action of insulin, which is strongly associated with obesity and physical inactivity, and the inability of the insulin-producing cells of...

Women living in energetically stressful conditions have significantly lower baseline salivary steroid levels compared to those in affluent environments. Developmental hypotheses suggest that interpopulation variation in ovarian function results from contrasting environments experienced during growth. We use a migrant study of Bangladeshi women to t...

This study evaluated the effects of socio-economic variables and migration history on the prevalence of betel nut and smokeless tobacco use in both UK- and Bangladeshi born migrant women resident in London. No significant difference in betel nut use prevalence was found among women of different generations. However, in all groups betel nut users we...

Abstract translated into French by Verena Rubio-Godoy (27 KB DOC)

Abstract translated into Spanish by Alejandra Núñez-de la Mora (27 KB DOC)

Average profiles of salivary progesterone in women vary significantly at the inter- and intrapopulation level as a function of age and acute energetic conditions related to energy intake, energy expenditure, or a combination of both. In addition to acute stressors, baseline progesterone levels differ among populations. The causes of such chronic di...

Average profiles of salivary progesterone in women vary significantly at the inter- and intrapopulation level as a function of age and acute energetic conditions related to energy intake, energy expenditure, or a combination of both. In addition to acute stressors, baseline progesterone levels differ among populations. The causes of such chronic di...

The measurement of steroids in saliva is both simple and non-invasive and has been widely used in field and clinical-based research. The observance of particular cultural practices by some populations, however, may hamper accurate hormonal analyses. The present study evaluated the effects of one such practice-the chewing of betel nut-on the accurat...

Two-chick broods of the blue-footed booby develop a dominance relationship during the junior chick’s first 2 weeks of life, when behaviour of the subordinate chick is conditioned through aggression by its 4-day-older sibling. We used natural and experimental situations to test the Challenge Hypothesis, which predicts a rise in testosterone to regul...

This study attempted to determine endocrine correlates of reproductive success in relation to major deleterious environmental conditions. In 1992, an El Niño southern oscillation event resulted in complete reproductive failure in a colony of blue-footed boobies, Sula nebouxi, on Isla Isabel in the Pacific Ocean off San Blas, Nayarit, Mexico (21.5 d...

Escherichia coli cells exposed to high temperatures exhibit a progressive loss of viability. We observed two mechanisms of cell death induced by lethal temperatures: with and without lysis. The number of cells lysed by heat decreased at later stages of the growth curve, when cells were pre-treated at lower temperatures for 10 minutes and when cells...