ArticleAmerican journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council2026
Reassessing Parity-Related Variation in Female Body Morphology: A Matched Analysis in a Contemporary Population.
Article in American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
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Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Early Pregnancy Body Roundness Index and Development of Adverse Pregnancy Outcomes: A Secondary Analysis of the nuMoM2b Study.Obesity (Silver Spring, Md.) · 2026Observational
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2 authors.
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Abstract
objectivesMorphological differences between parous and nulliparous women have long been interpreted as reproductive signatures. However, such patterns may instead reflect demographic composition. This study aimed to reassess parity-related morphological variation by reducing confounding from age and BMI using propensity score matching (PSM).
methodsAnthropometric data from 1339 Korean women aged 20-39 years were analyzed. Forty-five direct and derived body dimensions, collected following ISO 7250-1:2017, were compared between parous and nulliparous women before and after 1:1 nearest-neighbor PSM on age and BMI. Group differences were examined for torso breadths, depths, circumferences, and proportional indices.
resultsUnadjusted analyses reproduced well-known findings: parous women showed greater abdominal breadths and depths, larger circumferences, and adiposity patterns commonly attributed to childbirth. After PSM, however, most differences-including widely cited markers of lower-body enlargement and postpartum contour change-were substantially attenuated or statistically nonsignificant. Only a small number of proportional indices (e.g., underbust/weight, waist/weight, elbow/weight) retained modest differences, indicating that parity leaves limited, anatomically localized morphological signatures rather than broad structural changes.
conclusionsDemographic composition, rather than reproductive biology alone, accounts for much of the observed variation in cross-sectional datasets. Matching-based approaches clarify the independent contribution of parity, strengthen causal inference in anthropometric research, and underscore the need to consider population structure when interpreting life-history-related variation in adult female morphology.
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