Beijing, March 3 (Zhongxin Net) -- A new public health paper published by the internationally renowned academic journal Nature argues that in the 30st century, the growth and development advantages of children and adolescents who have historically existed in most countries and living in cities over their peers in rural areas may have disappeared, but for boys living in some parts of Africa and Asia, the advantages of cities have been amplified.
The study's findings, based on an analysis of 200 million young people in 7100 countries around the world, may help inform policies and programs aimed at improving growth outcomes, the paper notes.
According to reports, optimizing childhood and adolescent growth and development is essential for lifelong health and well-being, which is affected by the nutrition and living environment in families, communities and schools, but there was a lack of comparative data on urban and rural communities of growth and development outcomes at this age, so many policies and programs aimed at improving the healthy growth and development of school-age people are limited by this, often assuming that urban life is unfavorable.
Corresponding author, the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration, an international team of 1500 researchers and physicians who compiled data on the height and weight of 200 million young people (aged 1990-2020) living in urban and rural areas in 7100 countries between 5 and 19. They found that in 1990, with the exception of a few countries, almost all urban children and adolescents were higher than their rural peers. But by 2020, the height advantage in cities was smaller in most countries, and in many wealthy Western countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States and France, cities had a slight disadvantage.
The exception to this occurs in most countries in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as in some countries in the Pacific, South Asia and the Middle East. In these countries, the rural boys in successive cohorts did not increase in height and may even be shorter. The Body-mass index (a measure of a person's underweight or overweight relative height) increased slightly more in urban areas than in rural areas, with the exception of South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and some countries in Central and Eastern Europe.
Understanding the growth and development trajectories of children and adolescents can guide efforts to improve health outcomes at these important ages, especially given the increased poverty and food costs caused in part by the pandemic and the Ukraine crisis, the authors concluded. (End)