Leg length, body proportion, and health: a review with a note on beauty - PubMed (original) (raw)

Review

Leg length, body proportion, and health: a review with a note on beauty

Barry Bogin et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2010 Mar.

Abstract

Decomposing stature into its major components is proving to be a useful strategy to assess the antecedents of disease, morbidity and death in adulthood. Human leg length (femur + tibia), sitting height (trunk length + head length) and their proportions, for example, (leg length/stature), or the sitting height ratio (sitting height/stature x 100), among others) are associated with epidemiological risk for overweight (fatness), coronary heart disease, diabetes, liver dysfunction and certain cancers. There is also wide support for the use of relative leg length as an indicator of the quality of the environment for growth during infancy, childhood and the juvenile years of development. Human beings follow a cephalo-caudal gradient of growth, the pattern of growth common to all mammals. A special feature of the human pattern is that between birth and puberty the legs grow relatively faster than other post-cranial body segments. For groups of children and youth, short stature due to relatively short legs (i.e., a high sitting height ratio) is generally a marker of an adverse environment. The development of human body proportions is the product of environmental x genomic interactions, although few if any specific genes are known. The HOXd and the short stature homeobox-containing gene (SHOX) are genomic regions that may be relevant to human body proportions. For example, one of the SHOX related disorders is Turner syndrome. However, research with non-pathological populations indicates that the environment is a more powerful force influencing leg length and body proportions than genes. Leg length and proportion are important in the perception of human beauty, which is often considered a sign of health and fertility.

Keywords: beauty; body proportions; disease risk; health; leg length.

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Figures

Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Iliac height and subischial length. Credit: Roger Harris/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, royalty free image, labelling added by the authors.

Figure 2.

Figure 2.

Thigh length (from NHANES anthropometric manual).

Figure 3.

Figure 3.

Knee height (from NHANES anthropometric manual).

Figure 4.

Figure 4.

Sitting Height is measured from the vertex of the head to the seated buttocks (from NHANES anthropometric manual).

Figure 5.

Figure 5.

Approximate body proportions of Homo sapiens, Ardipithecus ramidus (4.4 MYA hominin, probable life appearance), and Pan troglodytes (chimpanzee). The figures are aligned at the crown of the head and the umbilicus to approximate a constant trunk length. Relative to trunk length, humans have the longest legs and shortest arms. Credits, Homo sapiens, SlideWrite Plus, 4.1, with authorization; Ardipithecus ramidus, Science 02 October 2009, ©J.H. Matternes,

http://www.jay-matternes.com/

; Pan troglodytes, Schultz, A. H. (1933). Die Körporproportionen der erwachsenen catarrhinen Primaten, mit spezieller Berüchsichtigung der Menschenaffen. Anthropologischer Anzeiger 10: 154–85 with permission of the publisher,

http://www.schweizerbart.de

.

Figure 6.

Figure 6.

Changes in body proportion during human growth after birth. Ages for each profile are, from left to right, newborn, 2 years, 6 years, 12 years, 25 years. The hair style and shading of the cartoon silhouettes are for artistic purposes and is not meant to imply any ethnic, eco-geographical, or “racial” phenotypic characteristics of the human species [provided courtesy of Dr. J. V. Basmajian].

Figure 7.

Figure 7.

Schultz’s sketches of the body proportions of hominoid fetuses. The original legend for this figure states, “All the figures have the same sitting height. The human fetus is the 4th month, the gorilla and the gibbon fetus correspond in development to the human fetus, but the chimpanzee and the orang fetus are slightly more advanced in their growth” [, p. 465–466, accessed from

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2808286

].

Figure 8.

Figure 8.

Human fetal circulation, adapted from [39] The relative amount of oxygen in the fetal blood is greatest in the upper thorax, neck and head; indicated by the red color of the vessels ascending from the heart. Blood flowing to the abdomen and legs is less well oxygenated; indicated by the violet color of the vessels descending from the heart.

Figure 9.

Figure 9.

Sitting height ratio by age for the four geographic groups defined by Eveleth and Tanner [45,46]. Age 20 includes data for adults over the age of 18 years. A larger SHR indicates relatively shorter legs for total stature (authors’ original figure).

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