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IJE Advance Access originally published online on February 14, 2006
International Journal of Epidemiology 2006 35(2):277-279; doi:10.1093/ije/dyl021
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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association © The Author 2006; all rights reserved.

Commentary

Commentary: Games people play—birthweight

Jonathan Wells

MRC Childhood Nutrition Research Centre, Institute of Child Health, 30 Guilford Street, London WC1N 1EH, UK. E-mail: J.Wells@ich.ucl.ac.uk

Accepted 25 January 2006

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

The ubiquitous use of birthweight data in epidemiological analyses owes more to its wide availability than to certainty as to exactly what it provides information about.1 On the other hand, studies have increasingly associated birthweight with both short-term survival2 and the risk of metabolic diseases in later life.3 Monitoring birthweight within and between populations, therefore, remains a highly pertinent epidemiological tool, providing that we bear in mind that it cannot tell us the mechanism linking birthweight variability with outcome.

Our difficulty in understanding the significance of birthweight variability stems from the fact that it is influenced by a large number of major biological processes. Environmental factors may relate to maternal pregnancy physiology, longer-term maternal phenotype, or broader climatic conditions. Genetic factors may relate to ethnicity, body size, or specific polymorphisms, and their influence may be mediated by multigenerational effects counterbalanced by within-lifetime plasticity. Given this complexity, it might be assumed . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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