East Asian or South Asian Fathers Usually Have Underweight Babies, Study

Father's ethnic background has a significant influence on a baby's birth weight, a new study finds.

Previous studies have established that a mother's ethnic background has a direct influence on her baby's birth weight. A new study by researchers from St. Michael's Hospital found that the same holds true for fathers too. Researchers from the university have been studying birth weight among different ethnic groups for a long time now because too small or too large babies might need medical interventions such as cesarean sections.

A baby's birth weight in the initial days after birth is used to measure its progress by doctors.

Current birth-weight curves are modeled around babies with parents of a Western European descent. According to these graphs, all underweight or small babies are usually born to parents with of Asian descent. Though these babies are considered underweight compared to babies born to mothers of Western European origin, they are of "normal" weight in their ethnic group. After examining 692,301 births recorded with Vital Statistics in Ontario between 2002 and 2009, researchers found that the same applies to fathers too. The researchers also found that babies born to a foreign-born mother and a foreign-born father weighed about 6 percent less than those whose both parents were born in Canada.

This is not the first study that looks at how parents' ethnic background affects a child. Previous studies found that Hispanic children with immigrant parents were just as likely to live with a securely employed parent as Hispanic children with U.S.-born parents, and substantially more likely to live with two parents and to be born healthy. They are more likely to live in poverty, to lack pre-kindergarten education and health insurance, and to die between the ages of 1 and 19.

The current study was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the SickKids Foundation. Findings were published online in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health.