Lozy M
Growth. 1978 Mar;42(1):55-8.
Ehrenberg has found a relation between heights and weights of children which was hypothesized to hold throughout the period of growth and under different environmental conditions. Early work showed that in developing countries the children were lighter than would be expected from their weights on the basis of that relationship, and more recently it was shown that in Western children the relationship requires modification over the first eighteen months of life. It is hypothesized that the decay of the modifying term (a negative exponential) is in some way an index of maturation. This suggested that its decay might well be affected socio-economic factors, and the analysis of three studies from developing countries, each involving different socio-economic groups of similar genetic background, showed that the rate of decay was indeed related to the socio-economic levels, with the better-off children exhibiting faster maturation.
埃伦伯格发现了儿童身高与体重之间的一种关系，这种关系被假定在整个成长阶段以及不同环境条件下都成立。早期研究表明，在发展中国家，儿童的体重比根据这种关系预期的要轻，最近又表明，在西方儿童中，这种关系在生命的头18个月需要修正。据推测，修正项（负指数）的衰减在某种程度上是成熟度的一个指标。这表明其衰减很可能受到社会经济因素的影响，对来自发展中国家的三项研究进行分析，每项研究都涉及具有相似遗传背景的不同社会经济群体，结果表明衰减率确实与社会经济水平有关，较富裕家庭的儿童成熟得更快。
