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Postnatal Human Developmental Stages and Transitions: Relationships to Aging Changes and Outcomes over the Life Course
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Topic Description
Post Date: May 22, 2026
Expiration Date: May 22, 2028
Purpose
NIH encourages research to understand how biological and biobehavioral processes during distinct postnatal developmental stages influence health, resilience, functional capacity, and aging across the life course. This topic focuses on:
- Developmental stages as sensitive periods when protective traits, stress responses, regenerative capacity, and regulatory mechanisms are active but may decline, change, or be lost with maturation
- How the timing, pace, and length of developmental stages affect adult traits, disease risk, and aging patterns
Understanding these processes may help identify pathways and therapeutic targets that could be sustained, reactivated, or mimicked to extend health span and delay aging-related decline.
Background
Humans progress through coordinated postnatal developmental stages and transitions prior to adulthood, including cessation of rapid brain growth, adrenarche, sexual maturation, thymic involution, and termination of longitudinal bone growth. These transitions reflect integrated shifts in endocrine regulation, metabolism, growth velocity, body composition, immune function, tissue remodeling, and neurobehavioral maturation. Juvenile and adolescent stages differ from each other and from adulthood in physiological, metabolic, immune, regenerative, and tissue-repair capacities.
Available evidence suggests that certain stress responses (e.g., fracture healing) and metabolic characteristics (e.g., regulation of atherogenic risk factors and insulin sensitivity) may be more favorable during specific juvenile stages than in adulthood or later life. However, mechanisms underlying these stage-specific differences remain poorly defined. Systematic research is needed to identify protective phenotypes across postnatal stages and clarify mechanisms distinguishing juvenile stages from adulthood. Such insights could reveal processes that might be sustained, reactivated, or mimicked later in life to prevent or delay aging-related functional decline and chronic disease.
Further research is needed to determine how physiological and biobehavioral processes during specific maturational stages—and variation in their timing, sequencing, and duration—shape adult phenotypes and long-term health trajectories. For example, later age at sexual maturation has been associated with longer life span and reduced risk of several cancers, whereas early life adversity has been linked to disruption of biobehavioral and homeostatic regulatory profiles and altered pace of biological aging. Understanding developmental plasticity during these stages, including effects on bone strength, immune repertoire, neuromuscular function, cognition, and brain health, may inform strategies to optimize youth health and promote healthy aging. Insights into sex differences may further clarify differences in disease susceptibility and aging outcomes.
Participating ICOs
NIA's interests include the following:
- Differences among specific human postnatal developmental stages and adulthood in physiological, metabolic, immune, and tissue-repair responses to stressors and disease risk progression
- Biological and behavioral mechanisms underlying stage-specific protective or adverse phenotypes
- Physiological and psychophysiological changes during maturational transitions (e.g., sexual maturation, thymic involution) and effects on aging-related mechanisms
- Effects of timing and duration of developmental stages on adult health phenotypes (e.g., bone mass, antibody repertoire, cognitive and brain health) and aging trajectories
- Development of valid, reliable biomarkers of maturational transitions and their functional effects
- Sex differences in these transitions and their impact on disease risk and aging patterns
- Translational studies to sustain or mimic favorable developmental phenotypes to extend health span
Chhanda Dutta, Ph.D.
[email protected]
Emily Hooker, Ph.D.
[email protected]
Fei Wang, Ph.D.
[email protected]
NCCIH is interested in research to understand how complementary and integrative health (CIH) approaches may influence biobehavioral and physiological processes during key postnatal developmental stages to promote emotional well-being, resilience, and whole-person health. CIH approaches include natural products and mind and body practices, which may modulate neuroendocrine signaling, immune function, and brain and physiological mechanisms involved in the stress response and emotion regulation. Research investigating how these approaches interact with developmental stages during childhood and adolescence may help identify mechanisms through which CIH strategies could support or enhance emotional regulation and resilience, sustain whole-person health, and potentially reduce the risk of chronic disease across the life span.
NCCIH Division of Extramural Research
[email protected]
NCI is interested in how the timing of cancer and its treatments interacts with developmental stage and aging processes across the life course, thereby influencing adaptive regulatory networks that coordinate sensing and physiological balance and recalibrate resilience, functional reserve, and the pace of aging-related change.
NCI’s interests include, but are not limited to:
- Central–peripheral mechanisms, shaped across developmental stages, that influence vulnerability to cancer- and treatment-related frailty, functional decline, and cognitive impairment
- Maturation of neuroimmune, metabolic, endocrine, and behavioral systems and their role in multisystem regulation or dysregulation in response to cancer and its treatments
- Stage-specific vulnerabilities across the life course
- Longitudinal, trajectory-based assessments of regulatory capacity and physical and cognitive function
- Strategies to restore resilience and promote healthy aging across the cancer continuum
NCI Cancer Aging
[email protected]
OBSSR is interested in behavioral and social science aspects of elucidating how biological and biobehavioral processes during distinct postnatal developmental stages influence health, resilience, functional capacity, and aging across the life course.
As OBSSR does not award or manage grants, applications must be relevant to the objectives of at least one of the NIH Institutes or Centers listed in the topic.
ONR is interested in advancing innovative research on the complexities of nutrition, its biology, and its critical role in health throughout the lifespan. Specific to this topic, ONR is interested in applications that:
- Improve the precision (measurement, interpretation, and attribution) of assessment of nutritional status as a biological variable.
- Explore the reciprocal relationships among nutritional status and the processes necessary to achieve that status (i.e., digestion, absorption, metabolism, integration into relevant biological systems, homeostatic control).
- Enhance our understanding of the function of single and multiple nutrients and other bioactive components of food within biological systems of interest (e.g., immunocompetence, neurobiology, and metabolism).
- Explore the relationships among nutrients and other bioactive components of food on pregnancies, maternal health, and child health.
Nicholas Jury, Ph.D.
[email protected]
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