Short Birth Length Increases Risk of Suicide

Height can easily suggest the self image of an individual. A person can feel empowered or confident if he or she if physically taller to most people in the vicinity.

Height can even be used as protection since a taller person can easily intimidate a potential threat especially when they are significantly taller than the threat.

Some even use their height to land a good job especially for jobs that requires a specific height.

Although short persons can still succeed and have the self confidence of taller individuals, the tall ones can be considered gifted because of the things they can do due to their height.

Complementing this idea is the recent study showing that height suggests the risk of suicide of a person. A report by Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health indicates that babies born short have a high risk of becoming suicidal.

This report was specifically targeted to men as the survey and monitoring was limited to male babies. To be specific, the report indicates that babies born under 47cm or 18.5 inches have a high risk of suicide.

This conclusion was reached based on the study of 300,000 Swedish born from 1973 to 1980.

It doesn’t even matter if the babies born short will end up relatively taller than many people their age. The risk in suicide for those who ended up taller is still the same.

A surprising conclusion was even reached on the study. Men who were born normal does not automatically remove them from the risk of ending their life.

Those who were born normal but unable to grow tall in their adult years have higher chances of committing suicide. 56% of those men see themselves shorter that most men have higher risk of ending their life.

This is actually a surprising yet alarming rate since height actually plays a role in determining the suicidal tendency of a person.

Aside from height after birth, there are other factors that suggest high risk of suicide. Premature babies are four times more likely to commit suicide.

This conclusion was reached since the premature babies are naturally born short, might have health problems and unable to reach the expected weight ideal for the newborn.

As already indicated, the premature baby may be able to grow taller and healthy but still he has a higher risk of ending his life compared to regular babies.

Those who conducted this research have pointed out the specific chemical serotonin as the cause of this behavior. Serotonin is very important for the newborn since it will help in developing the brain and would prevent impulsive behavior.

Aggression in later life can even be traced to the lack of serotonin during birth. Serotonin’s effect to the body of the newborn is only possible when the baby experiences normal development from birth.

This naturally places the premature babies or those that didn’t go through normal pregnancy care in a position that they will not experience proper brain development through serotonin.