Malnutrition and group brain- and body-weight variability: data in search of a hypothesis

Chronic malnutrition, which may be induced by a number of different experimental manipulations, appears, from a survey of the literature, to lead to greater relative whole-brain-weight variability in affected groups compared with controls; there is a tendency for the same pattern to emerge in the case of body-weight variability. A hypothesis which might throw some light on this general trend is proposed.