ANTHROPOMETRIC INDICATORS OF NUTRITIONAL-STATUS AND LEVEL OF MORTALITY

The strength of the relationship between several anthropometric indica tors of nutritional status, or more generally, standard of Living, wit h overall mortality at the population level is compared. The anthropom etric indicators examined include height, weight, weight-for-height, a nd weight-for-height(2) at various ages. The results demonstrate that height is most closely associated with the level of mortality. Weight- for height(2), in contrast, has the weakest association with mortality . Of the ages examined, age 6 consistently has the strongest relations hip with the level of mortality, whereas birthweight and adult measure s have the lowest associations with the overall level of mortality, al though the results for birthweight may be an artifact of biased data. Curiously, there is little or no sex difference in the slope of the re lationship between anthropometric measure and level of mortality after correcting for smaller size and longer life expectancies of females c ompared to males. Overall, the anthropometric indicators are very high ly correlated with mortality, exceeding 0.85 in some cases. This sugge sts that anthropometric dimensions may be a useful source of corrobora tive information when attempting to estimate demographic rates for pop ulations where the demographic data are suspect. (C) 1995 Wiley-Liss, Inc.