Original Article
Eighty-Year Trends in Infant Weight and Length Growth: The Fels Longitudinal Study

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Objectives

To investigate secular trends in weight and length growth from birth to 3 years of age in infants born from 1930 to 2008, and to assess whether these trends were associated with concurrent trends in pace of infant skeletal maturation and maternal body mass index.

Study design

Longitudinal weight and length data from 620 infants (302 girls) were analyzed with mixed effects modeling to produce growth curves and predicted anthropometry for infants born from 1930 to 1949, 1950 to 1969, 1970 to 1989, and 1990 to 2008.

Results

The most pronounced differences in growth occurred in the first year of life. Infants born after 1970 were approximately 450 g heavier and 1.4 cm longer at birth, but demonstrated slower growth to 1 year of age than infants born before 1970. Growth trajectories converged after 1 year of age. There was no evidence that relative skeletal age, maternal body mass index, or maternal age together mediated associations between cohort and growth.

Conclusions

Recent birth cohorts may be characterized not only by greater birth size, but also by subsequent catch-down growth. Trends over time in human growth do not increase monotonically, and growth velocity in the first year may have declined compared with preceding generations.

Section snippets

Methods

The sample consisted of 620 singleton American infants of European ancestory (302 girls; 318 boys) participating in the Fels Longitudinal Study, which began in 1929 as a study of normative child growth and development and continues today as a study of the early life antecedents of chronic diseases of aging.18 Mother-infant dyads living in Yellow Springs and nearby towns in southwestern Ohio have been enrolled from 1929 to present day.

All protocols and informed consent documents used in the Fels

Results

The average birth year in the analysis sample was 1963, with a range of 1930 to 2008 (Table I). Mean imputed gestational age decreased over time, while birth weight and maternal BMI generally increased over time, with 17.9% of mothers in the 1930 to 1949 cohort being overweight or obese compared with 47.6% of mothers in the 1990 to 2008 cohort (P values for trends <.01). Childhood BMI at 10 years of age also increased over time, with an increase of approximately 3 kg/m2 occurring between the

Discussion

We present the secular trends in the growth of American infants of European ancestry over an 80-year period marked by large shifts in the prevailing food and energetic environment and in maternal BMI. Unlike earlier analyses,9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 we were able to test whether any trends were changed by variations in the infant maturational clock and also maternal BMI and age.

A significant increase over time was observed for birth weight and birth length. Alberan22 has reported that birth weight

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      Regarding birth length, there is no or very small secular trend [11]. However, a recent study using data from 620 singleton American infants of European ancestry participating to the Fels Longitudinal Study found a 1.0 cm increase in birth length between the 1950–1969 and the 1970–1989 cohorts (approximately 0.25 cm per decade) [12]. Larger secular trends in neonatal length have also been observed in various developing countries [13,14].

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    Supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (R01 HD012252 and R01 HD053685). The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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