Risk of Hip Fracture May Be Determined Before Birth

LONDON (Reuters) - Children born to tall mothers or who fail to grow normally have twice the normal risk of hip fracture in later life, British researchers said on Thursday.

The team of scientists, who also discovered the link between low birth weight and an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, said tall maternal height and a low rate of childhood growth are two of the major factors involved in hip fractures.

Professor Cyrus Cooper, of Britain's Medical Research Council, said the two risk factors were independent of each other, so children with tall mothers who were also slow growers had four times the normal risk of hip fracture.

Cooper said environmental stress during pregnancy such as poor nutrition, smoking or excessive exercise might explain the phenomenon.

``If the mother is stressed during pregnancy, the baby may reset its endocrine systems to divert energy to survival rather than growth,'' Cooper said in an interview.

He and his team followed a study of the birth and childhood growth data of more than 7,000 people born in Helsinki, Finland between 1924 and 1933.

They linked the data to later hospital records and found that hip fracture was 2.1 times more likely in children born to mothers taller than 5 feet 4 inches than in children whose mothers were shorter than 4 feet 11 inches.

The study, published in the journal Osteoporosis International, also showed the risk of a fracture was nearly twice as high among children with slow growth rates between the ages of seven and 15 years than among children who grew more quickly.

The researchers had previously shown that growth in infancy is a predictor of bone mass in later life -- independent of other risk factors such as calcium intake, physical inactivity and smoking.