National Study of Health and Growth: social and biological factors associated with height of children from ethnic groups living in England

Abstract

A new surveillance system was initiated on selected growth and nutritional characteristics of children living in inner-city areas and children from ethnic minorities. The heights of Caucasian, Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Pakistani children in this study were compared with those of children in an existing surveillance study, who were chosen to be representative of the English population. Data for this representative sample were collected in 1982 and for the ethnic groups in inner city areas in 1983. The analysis included 13,107 boys and girls aged 5-11 years. Very large differences in height were detected between ethnic groups. The Afro-Caribbean children were the tallest, on average around 3.5 cm taller than the 1982 sample, while the Gujarati children were the shortest, on average about 3 cm below the 1982 sample. Adjustment for a large set of biological and social variables did not eliminate differences in height between ethnic groups. This would indicate that the use of British standards of height based on Caucasian children to assess growth of a child of another ethnic group in England should be interpreted with caution. Multiple regression analyses by ethnic group revealed differences in the pattern of associations between height and social and biological factors among groups. Generalizations from findings in one ethnic group to another in England are not appropriate.

The growth and nutritional status of healthy Asian children aged 4–40 months living in Sheffield

“…They are also comparable with growth patterns of north Indian children (unpublished results on 'welloff' Delhi children attributed to Banik, and cited by Eveleth & Tanner, 1976). British Asian schoolchildren (Rona & Chinn, 1986) had been noted to be close in height to 'well-off' Indians, i.e. taller than a general Indian reference group.…”

“…A similar method of targeting ethnic minority children, i.e. by selection of electoral wards with a high proportion of inhabitants born in the New Commonwealth, continent of Asia, was employed by Rona & Chinn (1986). By targeting the inner city, however, we inevitably excluded middle-class families.…”

“…Standard methods of random sampling (relatively straightforward for studying schoolchildren; Rona & Chinn, 1986) would clearly have been impossible, and recruitment by letter or telephone was not feasible. Adverse factors included a high rate of functional illiteracy, scarcity of telephones, inaccessibility by public transport, protracted overseas visits and requests by health visitors that certain vulnerable families be excluded.…”

The use of nutritional supplements by 4–12 year olds in England and Scotland

“…The NSHG is made up of three separately selected samples, an English and a Scottish representative sample and an English inner city sample. The`representative' samples contain children from schools selected by strati®ed random sampling with characteristics found to be similar to that of the general population (Rona & Chinn, 1986). The`inner city' sample includes children attending primary schools in ten areas that are characterised as`inner city' and a further ®ve with a high percentage of families of Afro-Caribbean background and ®ve with a high proportion of families originally from the Indian subcontinent (Rona & Chinn, 1986).…”

A longitudinal study of the growth of matched pairs of vegetarian and omnivorous children, aged 7–11 years, in the North-West of England

“…Those vegetarians who include dairy products in their diet, may be leaner but are less likely to show lower than expected growth compared with omnivores than vegans. Adequacy of growth seems to hinge around the presence of dairy products in the diet but many other nondietary factors can influence growth including: parent's height (Muller, 1976), puberty (Eveleth and Tanner, 1976), socio-economic group (Rona et al, 1978), smoking status of parents (Rona et al, 1981), season (Cole, 1993), mother's age (Goldstein, 1971), number of siblings (Goldstein, 1971;Rona et al, 1981), ethnicity (Rona and Chinn, 1986) and psychosocial adversity (Skuse et al, 1994). The level of physical activity may also affect growth.…”