Stature in adults as an indicator of socioeconomic inequalities in Mexico

Abstract

Stature reached at adulthood is a useful biological measure to estimate some factors related to long-term health and well-being of a population (1).Adult stature results from a combination of multiple factors, notably including genetics, age, weight at birth, nutrition at an early age, physical activity, diseases contracted during life, social and economic conditions, gender-related circumstances, and the environment (2-7).In Mexico, stature in adults has been studied, but with different aims and different cutoffs.For example, Vargas-Ancona in 1994 (8) and Lopez-Alvarenga in 2004 (9) researched the prevalence of individuals with short stature (SS).The Vargas-Ancona study reported a prevalence of SS of 76% for women ≤ 151 cm and of 58% for men ≤ 164 cm for individuals from Yucatan, a state in southern Mexico.In contrast, Lopez-Alvarenga found an overall SS prevalence of 20.7% (women ≤ 150 cm and men ≤ 160 cm), with a higher prevalence in women than in men (25.8% vs. 13.6%), in six Mexican cities in the center and north of the country.The same SS cutoffs as those of the Lopez-Alvarenga research were applied in a study about the ability of body mass index (BMI) to detect obesity-associated morbidity in subjects with a normal or ABSTRACTObjective.To estimate the association between stature in Mexican adults and some sociodemographic factors.Methods.We studied a sample of 30 970 subjects, using anthropometric data from the 2012 National Health and Nutrition Survey (ENSANUT 2012).The first quartile was used as the cutoff to define short stature.We analyzed differences among stature strata for sociodemographic variables by using the Kruskal-Wallis test.We estimated odds ratios to measure the association between stature and sociodemographic variables, controlling for potential confounders. Results.Persons from the southern region of the country were some three times as likely to be of short stature than were subjects in the northern region.The stature difference between the Mexican states with the highest and the lowest average stature was larger than the average difference in stature between Mexico and the United States of America.Adults who had had less than six years of schooling presented the highest prevalence of short stature, regardless of sex, region of the country, place of residence (rural or urban), or the proportion of indigenous language speakers in a state.In addition, the stratum with the highest marginalization (percentage of the population lacking education and services, with a low income, and living in a small community) showed the highest prevalence of short stature.Conclusion.In Mexico, adults who are of short stature have unequal living conditions when compared to those of average or high stature, and this could drive increases in health inequity.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.