Your Birth Weight Could Be The Key To Health And Success
If you’ve ever felt like your health and success were out of your control, maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s all because of your birth weight.
The University of Michigan’s Panel Study on Income Dynamics looked at data from over 12,000 people for a 35-year period.
The researchers analyzed two generations of families. That way, they could compare how birth weight affected siblings who otherwise shared the same family conditions.
Some of their conclusions were obvious. But some were unexpected.
Poverty Hurts Your Health
Not a big surprise.
If parents are poor at the time of pregnancy, that leads to worse birth outcomes for their children. According to the study, these effects get passed on to the next generation as well.
Poverty is often concentrated among racial minorities. That’s why health effects can be seen by race, too.
Through mid-life, major racial differences in health are caused by birth weight, parental family income, and health insurance.
But What If Poverty And Race Are Not Factors?
When compared to their normal birth weight siblings, low birth weight kids still had significant problems with health, education, and earnings throughout life.
No matter what the parents’ race or income, the kids with low birth weight:
- Were 30% less likely to be in excellent or very good health in childhood.
- Had over a 70% greater chance of being in fair or poor health as an adult. In fact, in their 30s and 40s, they seemed to be 12 years older than they really were.
- Were twice as likely to have health problems by their late 30s through their early 50s.
- Had much lower scores on reading, reading comprehension, and math achievement tests in school.
- Were about 33% more likely to drop out of high school.
- Earned about 10% less on an hourly basis from ages 18 to 26 and 22% less from ages 37 to 52.
That’s a heck of a life effect just from being underweight at birth.
What Can Be Done?
Certainly, this is a wake-up call to make sure everyone has adequate health insurance. That way, all pregnant women could have access to prenatal care.
This would also help to give kids access to the medical care they need for health problems caused by low birth weight.
But overall, it seems that low birth weight kids suffer physical and mental effects that follow them throughout their lives. No matter what the family’s income or health insurance coverage.
This appears to happen because the health of low birth weight children directly affects their ability to learn. Then the double whammy of poor health and education decreases their earnings throughout life.
Now that we know how serious the consequences are, it’s time to fund research to reduce the incidence of low birth weight.
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