A Swedish study finds that parents of low birth-weight children have a much greater risk of death from cardiovascular disease. The Karolinska Institutet tracked the parents of 783,814 children born in Sweden between 1973 and 1980. Researchers found that parents of low birth-weight children have a higher mortality from all causes of death and that those mothers have a greater risk of death from heart disease than the fathers. But they found a clear inverse relationship between a child’s birth weight and the fathers’ tendency to die from cardiovascular disease, a sign of a genetic relationship.
