快猫短视频

THE key factor in heart disease is not how much you weigh now, but how you
grew in the past. Sluggish growth in the first year of a boy鈥檚 life greatly
increases the risk of heart disease as an adult, according to a study of Finnish
children.

It鈥檚 long been known that babies with a low birthweight are roughly twice as
susceptible to coronary heart disease in adulthood as heavier babies. But it has
been unclear whether a child鈥檚 growth rate in the first few years of life is
also a factor.

To find out, David Barker, an epidemiologist at the University of
Southampton, and a team at the National Public Health Institute in Helsinki
looked at records of 4630 boys born in a Finnish hospital between 1934 and 1944,
of whom 357 developed heart disease as adults. On average, each child had 18
measurements of his height and weight before the age of 12.

Poor growth during the first year appeared to increase a boy鈥檚 risk of heart
disease in adulthood, regardless of whether he was born heavy or light. Barker
says the effect is dramatic: if all the boys had been the right birthweight and
achieved average size by the time they were a year old, the amount of coronary
heart disease would have halved. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 an enormous reduction in what is the
commonest cause of death in the world,鈥� he says.

But growth spurts are also bad. If a low-birthweight baby put on weight
rapidly after his first birthday, the risk of adult heart disease increased
further. Barker says poor nourishment in the womb probably makes a fetus divert
resources from muscle development to the brain. So the lightweight baby will
have a tendency to put on fat after birth and develop a body type prone to heart
disease. 鈥淧resumably, having been born thin and then staging compensatory
growth, a boy acquires more fat and not muscle.鈥�

Barker says this highlights the fact that it鈥檚 not your weight but how you
arrived at it that determines your heart disease risk. 鈥淚t鈥檚 the journey to
being overweight that matters鈥攖hat has profound implications for public
health,鈥� he says. He urges health workers to return to the tradition of keeping
meticulous records of the size of babies so that they can assess the risks of
later heart trouble.

鈥淚t is the first time that the early growth of boys who later develop heart
disease has been documented in any country,鈥� says Dino Giussani at Cambridge
University, who studies the effects of oxygen deprivation on fetuses. This
stresses the importance of regulating a baby鈥檚 diet. 鈥淧reventing rapid weight
gain in boys who were thin at birth is of paramount importance to reduce the
risk of heart disease later in life,鈥� he says.