Title
Birth weight and prepubertal body size predict menarcheal age in India, Peru, and Vietnam
Date Issued
01 January 2018
Access level
open access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
Publisher(s)
Blackwell Publishing Inc.
Abstract
Evidence on the associations of birth weight and prepubertal nutritional status with menarcheal age for low- and middle-income countries is limited. We investigated these relationships using the Young Lives younger cohort for 2001 Indian, Peruvian, and Vietnamese girls born in 2001–2002. Girls were followed at approximately ages 1, 5, 8, and 12 years. Weibull survival models estimated hazards of earlier menarche on the basis of birth weight Z-scores (BWZ), and age-8 BMI-for-age Z-scores (BMIZ) and height-for-age Z-scores (HAZ). Estimates controlled for potential individual-, mother-, and household-level confounders and for changes in anthropometry between 1 and 8 years. In adjusted models, BWZ predicted later age at menarche (hazard ratio (HR) = 0.90, 95% CI: 0.83–0.97). Conversely, HAZ (HR = 1.66, 95% CI 1.5–1.83) and BMIZ at 8 years (HR = 1.28, 95% CI: 1.18–1.38) predicted earlier menarche. Changes in HAZ and BMIZ between 1 and 8 years were not associated with earlier menarche. Associations were consistent across countries, though with variation in estimated magnitudes. Maternal height and age were associated with later menarche. This evidence points to consistently robust and opposite associations of birth weight versus prepubertal attained height and body mass index with menarcheal age in three diverse settings with regard to nutrition, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.
Start page
107
End page
116
Volume
1416
Issue
1
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Biología del desarrollo Pediatría
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85050947336
PubMed ID
Source
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
ISSN of the container
00778923
Sponsor(s)
This study was supported by the Sackler Institute Collaborative Initiative Aimed at Using Existing Datasets to Conduct Research on Adolescent Women’s Nutritional Status (Grant number 567850), the Eunice Shriver Kennedy National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD, Grant number R01 HD070993), and Grand Challenges Canada (Grant number 0072-03). We thank attendees at the Sackler grantee meeting on November 3–4, 2016 at the Sackler Insitute in New York and at the Young Lives Conference on Adolescence, Youth and Gender: Building Knowledge for Change, September 8–9, 2016 at the University of Oxford for valuable comments on our research findings. The authors would like to acknowledge Young Lives, an international study of childhood poverty, for providing them with preferential access to the data. Young Lives has been funded from 2001 to 2017 by UK Aid from the Department for International Development (DFID) and was cofunded by Irish Aid from 2014 to 2015. None of the funders had a role in the design, analysis, and writing of this article. The views expressed are those of the authors. They are not necessarily those of or endorsed by Young Lives, the University of Oxford, or the DFID. E.A., W.S., M.E.P., and J.R.B. contributed to the conceptualization, data interpretation, writing, and revision of this paper. E.A. conducted the data analysis.
Sources of information: Directorio de Producción Científica Scopus