Background: Child stunting, a measure of malnutrition, is a major global health challenge affecting 148.1 million children in 2022. Global stunting rates have fallen from 47.2% in 1985 to 22.3% in 2022, but trends before the mid-1980s are unclear including whether child stunting was previously prevalent in current high-income countries (HICs).

Methods: We conducted a systematic review of child growth studies before 1990 to reconstruct historical child stunting rates. We included reports of mean height by age and sex for children up to age 10.99. We excluded studies that were not representative of the targeted population and data for children under age two. Stunting rates were computed by converting the means and SDs of height to height- for-age Z-scores (HAZ) using the WHO standard/reference, combining the HAZ distributions for all ages, and measuring the share of the combined distribution below the stunting threshold.

Findings: We found 923 child growth studies covering 122 countries. We supple- mented these historical studies with stunting estimates from the 1990s onward from the Joint Malnutrition Estimates database. Many current HICs had high levels of child stunting in the early twentieth century similar to low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) today. However, there was heterogeneity: stunting rates were low in Scandinavia, the European settler colonies and in the Caribbean, higher in Western Europe and exceptionally high in Japan and South Korea. Child stunting declined across the twentieth century.

Interpretation: The global child stunting rate was substantially higher in the early twentieth century than in 1985, and the reduction of child stunting was a central feature of the health transition. The high stunting rates and subsequent reduction of stunting in HICs suggest that current HICs provide lessons for eradicating child stunting and that all LMICs can eliminate stunting.