Comparison of urban and rural groups of school-age children of the Tuva Republic according to Bioelectrical Impedance Analysis in the context of «transformation» of traditional lifestyle

Abstract

This study is concerned with the assessment of body composition indicators for urban and rural schoolchil-dren (related to the same adaptive type) of the Republic of Tuva in the context of «transformation» of the tradi-tional lifestyle. Comprehensive surveys of the population in this region were started by anthropologists back in the 1970s; therefore, this research should be considered as a continuation of the work on the dynamics of adaptation processes among the indigenous population in the light of changes of the environmental factors, primarily socio-economic and cultural. Comparison of morphological characteristics and growth rates of urban and rural school-children is particularly interesting, as changes in the lifestyle of the population during the transition to urban condi-tions entail significant increase in anthropometric indicators, which is especially pronounced in comparison with children of the same age living in less urbanized environment. As such, the relevance of this study is determined by the necessity to assess the degree of adaptation of those modern indigenous groups of the Tuva Republic, which are at the transitional stage from one ecological niche to another. Comparative anthropo-ecological studies have been carried out according to the standard morpho-physiological program in two groups of school-age chil-dren: the first one was examined in the city of Kyzyl (406 individuals) in 2018, and the second one in the Todzhin-sky kozhuun (district) of the Tuva Republic (435 individuals) in 2019. Schoolchildren examined in the capital of the republic (as the place of their birth and residence) can be classified as conditionally urban. This is the first genera-tion born within or moved to the city with parents from various rural areas of the steppe zone of the republic. A large number of internal migrants from other areas have also been found in the villages of Todzha, where previ-ously Todzhan Tuvans represented the ethnic majority. In this study, we assessed the overall body dimensions and body composition indices, acquired using the Bioelectrical Impedance Analysis. The obtained results show that there are virtually no significant differences between the anthropometric data from urban and rural groups of schoolchildren by overall dimensions and body composition across the entire age range. The observed differen-tiation at individual age points is more likely related to sample specifics. The age of menarche is not different in urban and rural groups: for urban girls it is 13.1 years, for rural girls — 13.0 years. The physical characteristics of schoolchildren indicate a relatively small shift in socio-economic conditions in regions with different extent of ur-banization. The differences are smoothed by the gradual withdrawal of the traditional way of life (stockbreeding), which is more intense among the indigenous groups of Siberia. Thus, our interim results of anthropo-ecological study conducted in Tuva Republic show significant desadaptive changes among the local indigenous population, both within the rural and the emerging urban communities.