Birth weight is a larger contributor to height than the socio-economic conditions in which a child grows up

Former Pop Center student Aditi Krishna is lead author on a new study in Economics & Human Biology that examines the role of birth weight in childrens’ height; Lisa Berkman, Gunther Fink, and SV Subramanian are co-authors. The study shows that prenatal conditions, reflected in birth weight, are more important in setting height trajectories in comparison to postnatal factors, which do not help children recover fully from early growth deficits. In other words, children born at a low weight but raised in wealthy families are nonetheless unable to catch up in to normal birth weight children in height.