Birth weight and childhood blood pressure.

A large body of literature suggests an inverse relationship between birth weight and blood pressure in children, adolescents and adults. The most persistent findings have been observed in children with a history of low birth weight or intrauterine growth restriction, while a large number of studies carried out in populations with normally distributed birth weight have shown conflicting results. A recently reported strong direct association between high birth weight and blood pressure, and the significant positive effect of postnatal growth on blood pressure suggests that the fetal origins of adult disease hypothesis should be expanded to include the role of excessive fetal and postnatal growth. In this paper, we review recent studies on the relationship between birth weight and blood pressure in childhood, with a focus on confounding variables that may explain the conflicting results of published work in this field.