RSF Visiting Scholar Rucker Johnson Co-Authors Study on Effects of Low-Birth Weight and Poverty

October 25, 2011

Low-Birth-Weight Effects

RSF Visiting Scholar Rucker Johnson has released a new study on the lasting effects of low birth weight and poverty. Johnson, an economist at the University of California-Berkeley, is currently studying the consequences of school desegregation and school quality on adult educational attainment, earnings, incarceration, and health status.

A press release describing his new study, entitled "Early-Life Origins of Adult Disease," can be read below: 

Vulnerability to asthma, heart disease, hypertension and stroke in adulthood begins very early in life and is linked to low birth weight and poverty, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health and co-authored by an economist at the University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy.

Nearly 26 percent of study participants who weighed less than 5.5 pounds when they were born had asthma at age 50, compared with about 16 percent of those who weighed more at birth.  Those who grew up in poverty were also more likely to have one of these fatal, debilitating conditions by age 50.

These data are the first nationally representative estimates of adult chronic disease onset by birth weight and by childhood family and neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage in the United States.

The study findings “provide clues to the childhood origins of racial health disparities in adulthood,” given the well-documented racial differences in socioeconomic disadvantage and low birth weight incidence, said Rucker Johnson, the Goldman School economist and associate professor who co-authored the study, “Early-Life Origins of Adult Disease,” with economist Robert Schoeni at the University of Michigan.

Johnson said the critical period of development from conception to age three is extremely sensitive to stressful environmental conditions because the speed of growth is more rapid then than at any other stage of the life course, and the nutritional needs are greatest. 

“Our study shows that interventions and policies that promote early childhood health and reduce childhood socioeconomic disadvantage generate immediate gains in well-being that can justify their existence,” said Schoeni.

The two researchers concluded in their paper that the study may enable more effective policies? to lessen the burden of disease and its economic costs.

Some 4,387 children in the study were first interviewed in 1968 as part of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and were followed until 2007, when they were between 39 and 56 years old. The Panel Study has been conducted since 1968 at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research.  Major study funding comes from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health. 

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