In this edition we address a question which has recently engaged the joint attention of epidemiologists and auxologists. There is mounting evidence that the seeds of some adult chronic diseases with their resulting fatalities are sown in infancy and childhood. Such diseases, it is said, are, at least in part, the long-term outcome of environmental events impinging on the infant and child, events not necessarily productive of clinical disease at the time of their occurrence. Growth, as we have shown in previous chapters, mirrors the cumulative effects of such events better, perhaps than any other index. So it is reasonable to ask: do differences in growth, as reflected in the end result of adult height or adult body build, relate to adult disease-specific morbidities and mortalities?

The question may be addressed in two ways. The more direct is to ask within a given population whether tall individuals, for instance, have a lower all-cause mortality than short ones. The less direct is to ask whether between or amongst populations there is an association between the mean height of the population and all-cause mortality. In the two instances the factors operating to cause the associations between stature and the endpoint are not necessarily the same.

Height

An example of the first approach has been presented by Waaler (1984), who linked height and weight measurements of all Norwegians aged 15 years and above taken between 1963 and 1975, with the death registry data in the Central Bureau of Statistics. The sample consisted of nearly 1.8 million individuals.