According to a recent analysis of data from NHANES surveys, the height of black women in the United States has been declining substantially both absolutely and relative to the height of white women in recent decades.
“Such a steep decline in height is practically unprecedented in modern history except during wartime,” writes the author, John Komlos, in a great new paper published in the journal Economics and Human Biology. His work suggests that the recent decline is due mostly to changes in height among low and middle income groups.
As a result, the gap between the height of white and black females, born during the years 1980-1986, has reached 2 cm – about twice as large as it was at its maximum last century. “This finding implies a strong setback for the biological well-being of black females.”
This is a thoughtful and compelling analysis of stature, an indicator one doesn’t hear much of in the world of population health, despite its obvious importance as an outcome measure of (particularly) childhood well-being and the many inputs into health. Komlos writes, “[A]t the population level, the height of youth provides information on probable biological outcomes decades into the future.”
I’m personally interested in height because it’s an important determinant of lung function: One of a handful of variables (the others being age and sex) used in equations to predict what’s normal for a given person. Analysis like these suggest that we need to pay a lot more attention to how changing socioeconomic circumstances impact height, measurements of respiratory health, and our interpretation of them.
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