Somatic comparisons at four ages of South Korean females and females of other Asian groups

Abstract

Somatic data were collected during April 1997 on 156 females ages 6, 9, 13, and 15 years, residing in urban Pusan, South Korea, and on 158 age peers residing in rural regions surrounding the city. Comparisons were made between urban and rural groups for measures of body size and form, skinfold thicknesses, the body mass index (BMI), and estimated arm muscle area (ARM). Age at menarche was retrospectively reported by the 13‐ and 15‐year‐olds. The data were analyzed in 2 (urban‐rural) × 3 (age) analyses of variance with an alpha level of P < 0.05. Age differences were evident for all dimensions. A significant main effect for urban–rural differences was found for stature, lower limb height, upper limb height, shoulder width, hip width, triceps skinfold, ARM, skelic index, and the trunk width index. Regardless of age, urban children were larger than rural children. Similar means were obtained for the BMI in urban and rural girls. Age at menarche was consistent with recent results; however, the rural sample (12.4 years) was significantly earlier than the urban sample (13.1 years). Compared with data collected four decades ago, present‐day 6‐, 9‐, 13‐, and 15‐year‐old females are taller and heavier at every age, indicating secular gains. Pusan females are similar in stature to age peers in Taiwan, Japan, and Hong Kong, and taller than the Chinese. Am. J. Hum. Biol. 11:735–744, 1999. © 1999 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.

Use of upper arm anthropometry, upper arm muscle area-by-height (UAMAH) and midupper- arm-circumference (MUAC)-for-height as indicators of body composition and nutritional status among children

“…Sex related effects might be controlling muscularity of boys and girls and it is the reason behind greater muscularity of boys. Similar trends were reported among Indian (Chowdhury and Ghosh 2009;Basu et al 2010;Sen et al 2011;Sen and Mondal 2013;Singh and Mondal 2014), Argentinean (Bolzan et al1999), South Korean (Kim et al 1999), Kenyan (Semproli and Gualdi-Russo 2007), Zimbabwean (Olivieri et al 2008), Turkish ) and Nigerian (Senbanjo et al 2014) children. The comparison of age-and sex-specific mean values of muscularity of children of the present study with their American counterparts (Frisancho 1981) reflects a very poor nutritional status.…”

Secular changes and predictors of adult height for 86 105 male and female members of the Thai Cohort Study born between 1940 and 1990

“…However, the benefit seems to have been unequally distributed as the rate of increase in height appears to have been substantially greater for urban compared with rural dwellers. Rural–urban differences in height have been reported in European24 25 and Asian26 27 populations but, at least in the European studies, height differences by locale appear to be decreasing rather than increasing. However, in Thailand increasing income inequality between rural and urban populations has been apparent from the 1960s through to at least the early 1990s,13 spanning the years in which the majority of our cohort members were children.…”

Secular growth changes in stature and weight for Chinese Mongolian youth, 1964–2005

“…The height of Japanese boys between 1950 and 1960 peaked at a dramatic increment of 8 cm per decade at the age of 14 years. In Korean children (Spurgeon et al 1997;Kim et al 1999) the reported increment approximated 2.1-2.6 cm/decade at age 9 years, 1.9-3.7 cm/decade at age 15 years. The secular increase in body weight was reported as 0.7 kg/decade and 0.6 kg/decade in Belgian boys and girls at the age of 18 years between 1830 and 1980 (Susanne and Bodzsar 1997), 1.2 kg/decade and 1.1 kg/decade in Australian adults during the last 100 years (Loesch et al 2000), which was lower than or close to that of Mongolians.…”