Evgeny A. Kaluzhniy

Introduction. Morphofunctional (MF) status of school children of Nizhny Novgorod region is analysed in connection with the degree of urbanization and the level of anthropogenic pressure in contrastive ecological clusters with satisfactory (1), comparatively tense (2), tense (3) and critical ecological situation.

Material and methods. Over 5 thousand of school children aged 7–17 years, examined in 2010–12, are under discussion. The program includes height, weight, BMI, chest girth, lung vital capacity (VC), systolic and diastolic blood pressure, somatotype according to Shtefko-Ostrovskiy method. Each cluster is characterized by absolute and standardized values of MF indices; significance of differences between means of parameters with continuous variability for separate ecological groups is estimated by using of analysis of variance and Scheffe-tests. Frequency of somatotypes (%) is calculated for each ecological group, Pearson's chi-square criterion is used. Comparative estimation of total somatic dimensions of rural and urban (literary data) children is held.

Results. The accelerating influence of modern level of anthropogenic stress (clusters 2 and 3) on indices of transversal body development (weight, BMI, chest girth) and VC of prepubertal (9 years) children irrespective of sex is shown. Decelerating influence of critical stress level (cluster 4) on indices of transversal body development of pubertal children aged 13 years is revealed. No significant differences in frequency of somatotypes in contrastive ecological clusters are fixed. Some gracilization of urban prepubertal boys compared to rural boys is shown. Some macrosomization (height and weight) of urban girls aged 7–13 years combined with modest decrease of chest girth as compared to rural girls is fixed. Up to 16–17 years all described differences are obviously smoothed.

Conclusion. The effect of anthropoecological correlations depends on the level of anthropogenic stress, sex and age of examined population and the system of MF indices. Height in our case is less sensitive to the increase of the level of anthropogenic stress. Ecosensitivity of girls is presumably less than boys. © 2023. This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license.