Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review
Anthropometric measures of birth and stature : Perspectives on russian mothers and newborns. / Mironov, Boris N.
Handbook of Anthropometry: Physical Measures of Human Form in Health and Disease. New York, NY : Springer Nature, 2012. p. 2561-2580.Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review
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TY - CHAP
T1 - Anthropometric measures of birth and stature
T2 - Perspectives on russian mothers and newborns
AU - Mironov, Boris N.
N1 - Publisher Copyright: © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012. All rights reserved.
PY - 2012/1/1
Y1 - 2012/1/1
N2 - Using data from St. Petersburg hospitals on the length and weight of 64,087 infants born between 1980 and 2005 and the physical stature and weight of 15,819 mothers born between 1929 and 1989, we find that women's living standards, as measured by their height, improved steadily from the end of World War II up to 1990, which is when women born in 1972 reached adulthood. For mother cohorts born after 1972 and reaching adulthood in the early and mid-1990s, heights declined. Evidence on both the length and weight of babies corroborates this pattern as there is a noticeable connection between the height and weight of newborns and that of their mothers, on the one hand, and social and demographic indicators, on the other. In our data, we see their values trace a "U" shaped curve with troughs near the mid-1990s. Thus, the anthropometric evidence concerning newborns as well as mothers points to the impact of strains on living standards that were prevalent during the period of economic restructuring of the 1990s. This is a general result that confirms a recurring pattern: periods of economic transitions are almost always accompanied by biological stress. In the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, newborns in Moscow and St. Petersburg were definitely inferior to European and white American newborns in weight and, most likely, in stature as well, as there is a close relationship between stature and weight.
AB - Using data from St. Petersburg hospitals on the length and weight of 64,087 infants born between 1980 and 2005 and the physical stature and weight of 15,819 mothers born between 1929 and 1989, we find that women's living standards, as measured by their height, improved steadily from the end of World War II up to 1990, which is when women born in 1972 reached adulthood. For mother cohorts born after 1972 and reaching adulthood in the early and mid-1990s, heights declined. Evidence on both the length and weight of babies corroborates this pattern as there is a noticeable connection between the height and weight of newborns and that of their mothers, on the one hand, and social and demographic indicators, on the other. In our data, we see their values trace a "U" shaped curve with troughs near the mid-1990s. Thus, the anthropometric evidence concerning newborns as well as mothers points to the impact of strains on living standards that were prevalent during the period of economic restructuring of the 1990s. This is a general result that confirms a recurring pattern: periods of economic transitions are almost always accompanied by biological stress. In the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, newborns in Moscow and St. Petersburg were definitely inferior to European and white American newborns in weight and, most likely, in stature as well, as there is a close relationship between stature and weight.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85028504276&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-1-4419-1788-1_159
DO - 10.1007/978-1-4419-1788-1_159
M3 - Chapter
AN - SCOPUS:85028504276
SN - 9781441917874
SP - 2561
EP - 2580
BT - Handbook of Anthropometry
PB - Springer Nature
CY - New York, NY
ER -
ID: 90899598