Socioeconimoc influences on the weight-height relationship in pre-school children

Ehrenberg has found a relation between heights and weights of children which was hypothesized to hold throughout the period of growth and under different environmental conditions. Early work showed that in developing countries the children were lighter than would be expected from their weights on the basis of that relationship, and more recently it was shown that in Western children the relationship requires modification over the first eighteen months of life. It is hypothesized that the decay of the modifying term (a negative exponential) is in some way an index of maturation. This suggested that its decay might well be affected socio-economic factors, and the analysis of three studies from developing countries, each involving different socio-economic groups of similar genetic background, showed that the rate of decay was indeed related to the socio-economic levels, with the better-off children exhibiting faster maturation.