Biological Implications of Human Mobility

This book outlays the possible influence of some important aspects of human migration and social mobility on the biological characters of human populations, including their health and well-being. It contains ten contributions from different researchers working in this area of research. The first chapter, written by Budnik and Henneberg, demonstrates the effect of social class and mobility on morphological characters of body size like height and body mass index (BMI) in a historical population of Poland. In Chapter Two, Chakraborty et al. shows that the migration of disadvantaged people to an adverse environment in an early period of growth and development may increase health risk in adulthood compared to those after completion of major physical growth period, or even compared to those who are born into that adverse environment. Chapter Three (by J. R. Ghosh) reveals the influence of educational and occupational positions on clinical hypertension among adult males from the eastern part of India. In the fourth chapter of this volume, S. Ghosh et al. attempts to find out the relationship between the socio-economic status of family and growth on height and weight demographics in school children aged 5-12 from Kolkata, India. Godina et al. in Chapter Five delineates the differences in various anthropometrical measurements in children and adolescents aged 7 to 17 years across different types of schools, representing different social strata in Moscow. Chapter Six by Kaczmarek discusses the implications of rural to urban migration and its impact on womens health status in Poland. The next chapter by Krzyżanowska* and C. G. Nicholas Mascie-Taylor discusses the impact of regional migration and social mobility on variation in adult height, weight and Body Mass Index, which is evidenced from a British cohort study