Dangers Await Babies with Altitude

Women who live in the world’s highest communities tend to give birth to under-weight babies, a new study suggests. These babies may grow into adults with a high risk of heart disease and strokes.

Research has hinted that newborns in mountain communities are lighter than average. But it wasn’t clear whether this is due to reduced oxygen levels at high altitude or because their mothers are under-nourished—many people who live at high altitudes are relatively poor compared with those living lower down.

To find out more, Dino Giussani and his team at Cambridge University studied the records of 400 births in Bolivia during 1997 and 1998. The babies were born in both rich and poor areas of two cities: La Paz and Santa Cruz. La Paz is the highest city in the would, at 3.65 kilometers above sea level, while Santa Cruz is much lower, at 0.44 kilometers.

Sure enough, Giussani found that the average birth weight of babies in La Paz was significantly lower than in Santa Cruz. This was true in both high and low-income families. Even babies born to poor families in Santa Cruz were heavier on average than babies born to wealthy families in lofty La Paz. “We were very surprised by this result,” says Giussani.

The results suggest that babies born at high altitude are deprived of oxygen before birth. “This may trigger the release or suppression of hormones that regulate growth of the unborn child, “says Giussani.

His also found that high-altitude babies tended to have relatively larger heads compared with their bodies. This is probably because a fetus starved of oxygen will send oxygenated blood to the brain in preference to the rest of the body.

Giussani wants to find out if such babies have a higher risk of disease in later life. People born in La Paz might be prone to heart trouble in adulthood, for example. Low birth weight is a risk factor for coronary heart disease. And newborns with a high ratio of head size to body weight are often predisposed to high blood pressure and strokes in later life.

練習(xí)：

1. According to the passage, one of the reasons why newborns in mountain communities are underweight is that their mothers are underweight.

A. Right B. Wrong C. Not mentioned

2. Giussani’s team members are all British researchers and professors from Cambridge University.

A. Right B. Wrong C. Not mentioned

3. Giussani did not expect to find that the weight of a baby had little to do with the financial conditions of the family he was born into.

A. Right B. Wrong C. Not mentioned

4. The weight of a newborn has to do with the supply of oxygen even when he was still in his mother’s womb.

A. Right B. Wrong C. Not mentioned

5. High-altitude babies have heads that are larger than their bodies.

A. Right B. Wrong C. Not mentioned

6. High-altitude babies have longer but thinner limbs than average.

A. Right B. Wrong C. Not mentioned

7. Guissani has arrived at the conclusion that babies in high-altitude regions are more likely to have heart trouble when they grow up.

A. Right B. Wrong C. Not mentioned

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