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Intergenerational influences on the growth of Maya children: The effect of living conditions experienced by mothers and maternal grandmothers during their childhood
journal contribution
posted on 2015-11-10, 12:18 authored by Hugo Azcorra, Federico Dickinson, Barry Bogin, Luis Rodriguez, Maria Ines Varela SilvaObjectives: To test the hypothesis that living conditions experienced by maternal grandmothers (F1 generation) and
mothers (F2 generation) during their childhood are related to height and leg length (LL: height2sitting height) of their
6-to-8 year old children (F3 generation).
Methods: From September 2011 to June 2012 we obtained height and LL, and calculated z-score values of these
measurements for 109 triads (F1, F2, F3) who are Maya living in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico. Multiple regression models
were adjusted to examine the relation of anthropometric and intergenerational socioeconomic parameters of F1 (house
index and family size during childhood) and F2 (paternal job loss during childhood) with the z-score values of height
and LL of F3.
Results: Children’s height and LL were positively associated with maternal height and LL. This association was relatively
stronger in LL. Better categories of grand-maternal house index were significantly associated with higher values
of height and LL in grandchildren. Grand-maternal family size was positively related with LL, but not with height.
Conclusions: Our findings partially support the hypothesis that living conditions experienced by recent maternal
ancestors (F1 and F2) during their growth period influence the growth of descendants (F3). Results suggest that LL is
more sensitive to intergenerational influences than is total height and that the transition from a traditional rural lifestyle
to urban conditions results in new exposures for risk in human physical growth.
Funding
This work was sponsored by the National Council of Science and Technology of Mexico [Grant Number: 16804].
History
School
- Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences
Published in
American Journal of Human BiologyVolume
27Issue
4Pages
494 - 500Citation
AZCORRA, H. ... et al 2015. Intergenerational influences on the growth of Maya children: The effect of living conditions experienced by mothers and maternal grandmothers during their childhood. American Journal of Human Biology, 27 (4), pp.494-500Publisher
© Wiley Periodicals, IncVersion
- NA (Not Applicable or Unknown)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2015Notes
This paper is closed access.ISSN
1042-0533eISSN
1520-6300Publisher version
Language
- en