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IJE Advance Access originally published online on October 28, 2004
International Journal of Epidemiology 2004 33(6):1249-1251; doi:10.1093/ije/dyh355
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IJE vol.33 no.6 © International Epidemiological Association 2004; all rights reserved.

Commentary

Commentary: The child is the mother of the woman: Intergenerational associations in maternal anthropometry

Susan MB Morton

School of Population Health, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand. E-mail: s.morton@auckland.ac.nz

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The child is the father of the man

[William Wordsworth (1770–1850)]

Wordsworth probably never envisaged how prophetic this simple, albeit non-gender specific, statement might be in terms of succinctly summarizing the relationships that exist in anthropometric measures and reproductive outcomes across generations. The simplicity of the statement though hides the complexity of the intergenerational associations and highlights the age-old problem, put more gender specifically, of which comes first—‘the child of the mother or the mother of the child’. Whatever the starting point or measure used for determining associations between one generation and the next, inevitably that measure will itself be the result of the cumulative biological and social influences from previous generations.

There is a growing body of literature describing the intergenerational continuities in measures of size at birth, suggesting that a mother's intrauterine environment and her early development directly influence her own reproductive outcomes. This relationship was suggested over . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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