AbstractFindings from the field of Developmental Origins of Health andDisease (DOHaD) suggest that some of themost pressing public health problems facing communities today may begin much earlier than previously understood. In partic-ular, this body of work provides evidence that social, physical, chemical, environmental, and behavioral influences in early life play a significant role in establishing vulnerabilities for chronic disease later in life. Further, because this work points to the importance of adverse environmental exposures that cluster in population groups, it suggests that existing opportu-nities to intervene at a population level may need to refocus their efforts“upstream”to sufficiently combat the fundamen-tal causes of disease. To translate these findings into improved public health, however, the distance between scientific discov-ery and population application will need to be bridged by conversations across a breadth of disciplines and social roles. And importantly, those involved will likely begin without a
shared vocabulary or conceptual starting point. The purpose of
this paper is to support and inform the translation of DOHaD findings from the bench to population-level health promotion and disease prevention, by: (1) discussing the unique commu-nication challenges inherent to translation of DOHaD for broad audiences, (2) introducing the First-hit/Second-hit Frameworkwith an epidemiologic planningmatrix as amodel for conceptualizing and structuring communication around DOHaD, and (3) discussing the ways in which patterns of communicating DOHaD findings can expand the range of solutions considered and encourage discussion of population-level solutions in relation to one another, rather than in isolation.