Health Shocks, Recovery, and the First Thousand Days: The Effect of the Second World War on Height Growth in Japanese Children
Health Shocks, Recovery, and the First Thousand Days: The Effect of the Second World War on Height Growth in Japanese Children
复制标题
健康冲击、恢复和最初的一千天：第二次世界大战对日本儿童身高增长的影响
DOI：
10.1111/padr.12444
复制
发表时间：
2021
影响因子：
2.5
通讯作者：
Cole Tim J.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Schneider Eric B.;Ogasawara Kota;Cole Tim J.
本文利用第二次世界大战期间日本平民的健康冲击，了解不同发育阶段的健康冲击对儿童长期生长模式的影响，并测试早期健康冲击后是否有可能恢复。我们构建了1929年至2015年6-19岁男孩和女孩平均身高的县级数据集。将同一出生队列在不同年龄记录的身高联系起来，我们测量了第二次世界大战期间健康冲击对儿童队列生长模式的反事实因果影响。我们发现，在童年晚期和青春期暴露于战争的队列中，战争的影响最大：这些队列在成年时矮1.7-3.0厘米，青春期发育延迟，成熟速度比战争从未发生时慢。然而，对于早年经历过战争的儿童来说，并没有出现持续的健康损失，这表明随着战后健康状况的改善，追赶性增长是可能的。这些发现挑战了儿童无法从早期营养冲击中恢复的千年共识，并表明青春期是健康冲击的敏感时期。
This article uses the health shock on Japanese civilians of the Second World War to understand the effects of health shocks at different developmental stages on children's long‐run growth pattern and to test whether recovery is possible after an early‐life health shock. We construct a prefecture‐level dataset of mean heights of boys and girls aged 6–19 from 1929 to 2015. Linking the heights recorded at different ages for the same birth cohort, we measure a counterfactual causal effect of the health shocks during the Second World War on the cohort growth pattern of children. We find that the war effect was greatest for cohorts exposed to the war in late childhood and adolescence: these cohorts were 1.7–3.0 cm shorter at adulthood and had delayed pubertal growth and slower maturation than they would have had if the war had never occurred. However, there were no persistent health penalties for children exposed to the war in early life, suggesting that catch‐up growth was possible as health conditions improved after the war. These findings challenge the thousand‐days consensus that children cannot recover from nutritional shocks in early life and indicate that adolescence is a sensitive period for health shocks.