Here’s another reason to encourage your pregnant partner to give up smoking. She may give birth to an underweight baby who could be less likely to marry and more likely to develop heart disease.

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That’s the finding of a new study in the UK, which has found that men who were small when they were born may be less likely to marry.

The finding may explain why small size at birth is a risk factor for heart disease later in life, researchers propose. Single men have high rates of cardiovascular disease and a shorter life span, they say.

"We've known for about 150 years that married men do better than single men with regards to heart disease," says Dr David Phillips, study author and a professor of endocrinology and metabolism at the University of Southampton in England. "The thought is that because you had a wife you had social support, and that social support is protective against disease."

Phillips says studies done in the United States "have also shown that small babies, when they become adults, have a lot of heart disease. The smallest babies are two to three times more likely to die of heart disease. Given these two facts, we thought that maybe something that happens early in life, as indicated by birth weight, had something to do with getting married."

The men who had never married were, on average, 2 centimeters (0.8 inches) shorter and 2.4 kilograms (5.28 pounds) lighter than the other men were at age 15. These men also tended to come from lower social classes and had lower income.

"The relationships we found show that if you were about 7½ pounds or more when born, then one in 20 of the men didn't marry. But if you were about 5 pounds when you were born, one in five don't marry, which is about 20 percent. And that's significant," he says.

Phillips says lower birth rates affect body size and looks. And that may account, at least in part, for the lower marital rates.

Lower birth size could also affect emotional growth, Phillips adds: "These findings suggest that these changes in body development have some effect on psychological development, and one of the results is that these men are less likely to marry."

The findings were published in the March issue of the British Medical Journal. Problems with early bonding between mothers and babies could play a role, says Marion Solomon, a research psychologist with the Universities of California in Los Angeles and San Diego.

"Low birth weight may affect the ability for the child and mother to form solid secure attachment bonds," she explains. "A low birth weight baby is more prone to crying, probably has health problems right from the beginning of life, and that does affect how a mother responds to the baby as well as vice versa."

Attachment theory in psychology suggests babies who can't develop secure relationships with their mothers early in life have difficulty with relationships, Solomon explains.

"An early failure in attachment bonding, if it isn't corrected in the primary years, tends to be imprinted and that becomes the way the child, and later the adult, is going to connect in love relationships," she says.
 

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