04/09/2001

Short on marriage

Researchers trying to understand why unmarried men have shorter life spans have stumbled on a surprising fact: Men who are small at birth are less likely to get married.

More specifically, a man's smaller size at birth and at age 15 might be an indication of health problems, such as cardiovascular disease, which could preclude them somehow from choosing a lifelong mate.

Researchers from Australia, Great Britain and Finland studied 3,577 men born at a Helsinki hospital between 1924 and 1933. The scientists identified 259 men who had never married and found that they were about 1 inch shorter and 5.3 pounds lighter at age 15 than those men who later married. The smaller men also tended to come from lower social classes and have lower incomes.

The study was published in last week's issue of the British Medical Journal.

Sherry Jacobson

Early female puberty

Girls who go through puberty early, particularly African-American girls, are more likely to be overweight, say researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Their study of 6,500 girls – divided into four racial groups – found that early-maturing girls tended to be 1/2-inch shorter and 8 pounds heavier than those who matured later.

About 12 percent of the black girls and 14 percent of the Hispanic girls had their first periods before age 11, compared with 8 percent of white girls. Asian-American girls were most likely to mature late, about 27 percent of them after age 14.

An alarming 58 percent of the early-maturing black girls were overweight, meaning they exceeded the 85th percentile of the body mass index for their age.

The study was published in the April issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

Sherry Jacobson