A GROWING body of research supports the view that heart disease has more to do with men's birth weight, social status and their mother's childhood health than their own lifestyle or diet. When doctors at the Royal Free Hospital medical school in London looked at the health status of 6,000 men aged 40 to 59, they learned that sons of manual workers are far more likely to suffer heart attacks than those with white collar fathers even when they abandon their working class roots.
Middle aged men whose fathers had manual jobs had a 30 per cent higher risk of heart attack, even when the men had moved into a "non manual" social class, and after other risk factors like smoking and cholesterol levels were taken into account. Writing in The Lancet, the researchers concluded that "childhood socio economic status may have a persisting influence on ischaemic heart disease risk in adult life."
Other research published in The Lancet revealed links between small birth size and the risk of heart disease or stroke in later life. In one study, scientists based at the British Medical Research Council Environmental Epidemiology Unit, Southampton, examined the medical records of more than 13,000 men born in Hertfordshire and Sheffield between 1907 and 1930. They showed that death rates from both heart disease and strokes were significantly related to small size at birth.