Slow start leads to poor earnings

Babies' development influences how they will fare as adults

Babies who develop slowly are more likely to be on lower incomes later in life, researchers suggest.

The finding was true no matter what class they were born into.

The research is being presented to the Second World Congress on the Foetal Origins of Adult Disease in Southampton.

The conference will also hear that women who eat high protein diets while pregnant produce stressed babies.

Slow growth

In the income study, Finnish researchers studied 4,630 men from Helsinki, born between 1934 and 1944.

An unbalanced maternal diet can increase the mother's stress hormone levels

Dr Keith Godfrey, University of Southampton

They looked at height measurements taken between birth and the age of 12. Most had been measured around 18 times during their childhood.

Researchers also looked at the level of education the men had achieved, and at information about their income and occupation from the 1990 census.

They found those who had grown slowly between birth and the one-year-old had lower incomes as adults.

The team of researchers, from the University of Southampton and the National Public Health Institute in Helsinki, suggested slow growth as an infant might lead to slow brain development.

Professor David Barker, from the University of Southampton, who worked on the study, said the findings highlights the importance of infant growth in determining later intelligence.

"We conclude that biological processes linked to poor growth in infancy lead to lifelong impairment of cognitive function with consequent lower occupational status and income.

"Promotion of infant growth will not only reduce infant mortality, but it will also improve cognitive function and reduce the risk of death from heart disease and type 2 diabetes in later life."

'Unbalanced diets'

In the second study, University of Southampton researchers found women who eat high protein/low carbohydrate diets give birth to offspring with high stress responses.

They studied a group of men and women aged 28 to 30 who had been born in Motherwell Maternity Hospital, Scotland, whose mothers had been advised to eat one pound of red meat per day and avoid carbohydrate-rich foods while pregnant.

Other research found that children of mothers who ate more meat and fish and less green vegetable consumption, had raised blood as adults.

They have also been seen to produce higher levels of the stress hormone, cortisol.

Dr Keith Godfrey, who led the research, said: "One possible reason for this is that an unbalanced maternal diet can increase the mother's stress hormone levels, exposing the fetus to excess amounts of these hormones and leading to persisting changes in stress responses.

"We have known for some time that high-protein diets in pregnancy are not good for the developing baby.

"Now it seems that an unbalanced diet during pregnancy can also have long-term effects on the intensity of stress responses in the offspring making them prone to ill-health during later life."