hat factors determine birth weight and do they have any biological significance for the future health and welfare of the individual? These are important questions for all paediatricians and four groups of experts have been approached to independently give their thoughts on key areas. The aim was for concise pithy comments and opinions, so the length of the articles was rigourously controlled. F...

BACKGROUND We previously identified via a genome wide association study variants near LEKR and CCNL1 and in the ADCY5 genes lead to lower birthweight. Here, we study the impact of these variants and social stress during pregnancy, defined as social adversity and neighborhood disparity, on infant birth size. We aimed to determine whether the addition of genetic variance magnified the observed as...

BACKGROUND Size at birth has taken on renewed significance due to its now well-established association with many health and health-related outcomes in both the immediate perinatal period and across the entire life course. Optimizing fetal growth to improve both neonatal survival and population health is the focus of much research and policy development, although most efforts have concentrated o...

BACKGROUND Birth weight is a composite of skeletal size and soft tissue. These components are likely to have different growth patterns. The aim of this paper is to investigate the association between established determinants of birth weight and these separate components. METHODS Weight, length, crown-rump, knee-heel, head circumference, arm circumference, and skinfold thicknesses were measure...

Genetic parameters from both single-trait and bivariate analyses for prolificacy, weight and wool traits were estimated using REML with animal models for Columbia sheep from data collected from 1950 to 1998 at the U.S. Sheep Experiment Station (USSES), Dubois, ID. Breeding values from both single-trait and seven-trait analyses calculated using the parameters estimated from the single-trait and ...

OBJECTIVE To assess the impact on birth size and risk of low birth weight of alternative combinations of micronutrients given to pregnant women. DESIGN Double blind cluster randomised controlled trial. SETTING Rural community in south eastern Nepal. PARTICIPANTS 4926 pregnant women and 4130 live born infants. INTERVENTIONS 426 communities were randomised to five regimens in which pregna...

Aim To determine whether there are differences in size between the male and female pronuclei immediately before the pronuclear membrane breakdown (PNMBD) and to evaluate whether pronuclear size differences influence normal birth rates. Methods Time-lapse photography was used to measure the size of each pronucleus, while the outcome of 71 frozen-thawed single blastocyst transfers in patients r...

This 1998 study investigated the association between intake of fish and fish oil during pregnancy and full-term infants' size at birth in an Icelandic fishing community. Healthy women aged 20-40 years of normal weight before pregnancy (body mass index: 19.5-25.5 kg/m(2)) and at 38-43 weeks of gestation were selected randomly. Information on infant size at birth was collected from maternity reco...

This analysis was conducted to explore the association between 5 birth size measurements (weight, length and head, chest and mid-upper arm [MUAC] circumferences) as dependent variables and 10 maternal factors as independent variables using canonical correlation analysis (CCA). CCA considers simultaneously sets of dependent and independent variables and, thus, generates a substantially reduced t...

In most cases, cells must increase their size before they can divide. Hence, a small size has been used often as a phenotype for mutants that accelerate initiation of division, such as the celebrated WHI mutants of budding yeast. Recently, we measured the DNA content of all nonessential gene deletion strains in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Surprisingly, there was little, if any, correlation betwee...