Introduction. A number of studies have shown that the Khalka rural pastoral population of Mongolia leading a traditional lifestyle is not characterized by acceleration of development and a secular trend in somatic characteristics of the body. The purpose is to study the morphological variability of head and face features in the adult rural Khalkha-Mongolian population against the background of variability of the same features in the Chuvash group and try to catch acceleration trends based on measuring head features.
Materials and methods. The data (370 men and 355 women aged 18-60) was obtained during anthropoecological expeditions in 1986-1990 in 4 Khalkha-Mongolian somons. As a comparative material, data on the Chuvash of Bashkiria were used. Regression analysis was applied. The age-related variability of normalized values of cephalometric traits was assessed using variance analysis. For the Mongolian and Chuvash populations, the coefficients of sexual dimorphism of individual features of the face and head (according to V. Deryabin`s formula), as well as the Mahalanobis distance between female and male samples were determined.
Results and discussion. For the studied characteristics (head length and breadth, the minimal forehead breadth and facial breadth, face height, facial and head indexes) in men, no reliable links were found between the variability of these traits and age. Variance analysis of normalized values of cephalometric signs revealed no differences in either the male or female Mongolian sample. The Mahalanobis distances calculated from the complex of head and face signs between the female and male Mongolian subsamples are noticeably smaller than the corresponding values obtained for the Chuvash group.
Introduction.The purpose of this work was to study the physical development of modern newborns in rural areas and analyze the influence on their basic anthropometric indicators of such biological factors as the serial number of pregnancy and childbirth, as well as the age of the parents at time of.
Materials and methods. Materials on rural children were collected in 2020–2022 in the Baranovichi district of the Brest region of the Republic of Belarus on the basis of the Children's City Clinic in the city of Baranovichi. The method of analyzing outpatient cards was used. A total of 231 newborn histories were studied (120 boys and 111 girls). The main anthropometric characteristics of children (body weight, body length, head circumference and chest circumference), as well as the age of the parents and the number of pregnancies and births in the mother were taken into account. The significance of differences was assessed based on Student's t-test. To conduct a comparative analysis of the dynamics over time of the physical development of newborns, materials from surveys of 1976–1978 were used.
Results. The bulk of modern births were women aged 25–34 years (66,6%). More than half of the newborns were born from repeated births – 79,2%. The average age of primiparous women was 25,2±0,7 years, multiparous women – 30,5±0,4. It was found that modern rural newborns had higher average indicators of physical development than newborns of 1976–1978, except for head circumference. Children from repeated births were larger in size, especially boys, in whom the difference reached a statistically significant level. Weak but significant positive correlations were noted between some indicators of the physical development of rural newborns with the age of the parents and the serial number of pregnancy and birth of the mother.
