National, Oct. 22 -- National, 22nd October 2026: Warwick researchers followed more than 92,000 children from infancy to adolescence to explore how their size at birth was associated with early development, and later performance in national school tests.
The large study found that children who were smaller than expected at birth - meaning that they weighed less than most babies of the same sex who were born at the same stage of pregnancy - tended to achieve lower scores in some school subjects, particularly mathematics and reading. The differences were still apparent in adolescence, suggesting that the link between size at birth and academic performance persists well beyond early childhood into mid-teens.
All the children in the study wer...