Getting a head in childhood

The Times covers research published in the journal Paediatrics indicating that head size at one year old predicts intelligence in later childhood.

A research team led by Dr Catherine Gale measured the head circumference of 633 children at birth, and regularly afterwards.

The kept in contact with the families and assessed the children at 4 and 8 years for mental performance.

The team found that intelligence was positively related both to head size at birth, and to head growth during childhood.

Interestingly, the same team did a study looking back at older people’s medical records and compared their head size at birth and in adulthood, to their IQ measured in their 60s and 70s.

They found no relationship between birth head size and current IQ, but did find a relationship between adult head size and IQ.

This may suggest that their are complex life-long factors affecting brain development that affect intelligence differently as we age.

Link to article in The Times.

One thought on “Getting a head in childhood”

  1. I would believe it – my kids both had huge heads and I ended up with C-sections for both of them. Their heads were so big they couldn’t move far enough down the birth canal to engage the cervix.
    They’re smart, but they sure don’t apply it yet…

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: