HEIGHT OF CONSCRIPTS IN EUROPE - IS POSTNEONATAL MORTALITY A PREDICTOR

The height of conscripts has increased steadily during recent decades in Europe. We have collected data on conscript height from 11 European countries to examine if this trend is continuing. In the Scandinavian countries and The Netherlands the increase in height reached a platea u during the 1980s, while the trend towards increasing adult height co ntinued in the middle and southern European countries. There are still large differences between the countries (1990: The Netherlands 181.2c m and Portugal 170.3cm), with a marked trend for the tallest conscript s to be in the north and the shortest in the south. It has been sugges ted that the secular increase in adult height is mainly determined by an increase in growth during the first years of life. We examined post neonatal mortality (PNM) as a proxy for adverse environmental factors, mainly poor nutrition and infections, affecting growth during infancy , and related it to conscript height in the European countries. The ge neral pattern was a rapid decrease in PNM until a low level was reache d, after which it remained low, or decreased only very slowly. In coun tries where the increase in conscript height has levelled off, PNM rea ched a low and stable level (about 3-5 per thousand) approximately two decades before this stagnation. We speculate that the increase in hei ght will continue in the rest of the European countries until approxim ately two decades after PNM has reached the same low level.