Summer-borns are healthier

The height of people appears to depend on the season of their birth. Jan Wohlfahrt and his team from the Danish Epidemiology Science Centre in Copenhagen, Denmark, studied 1,166,206 children born between 1973 and 1994. They found that children born in April were almost a quarter of centimetre taller -- and also heavier -- than those born in winter. The winter-borns stayed slightly longer in the womb. The researchers attribute these changes to differences in the prenatal exposure as well as the influence of the environment after birth ( The Lancet , Vol 352, No 6712).