Maternal, childhood factors affect obesity risk
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Factors ranging from her mother’s body mass index to her own weight gain in early childhood influence the likelihood that a female child will grow up to become overweight, new research hints.
While the findings offer clues to how obesity prevention efforts might target certain time points in a person’s life, they also underscore the importance of maintaining a healthy weight for life, Dr. Mary Beth Terry of Columbia University in New York City told Reuters Health.
Terry and her team studied a group of 261 women born between 1959 and 1965 with an eye toward figuring out which factors would independently predict their risk of obesity at age 20 and at age 40.
They found that the amount of weight a woman’s mother gained during pregnancy influenced her risk of being overweight at age 20, with every 10-pound increase in weight gain associated with a 65 percent greater likelihood of being overweight.
But maternal pregnancy weight gain had no effect on whether or not a woman would be overweight at age 40, suggesting that current environmental factors had a greater influence.
Mom’s body mass index, as well as her own birth weight, also influenced the likelihood that the daughter would be overweight at age 20, but not at age 40.
Rapid weight gain between one and seven years of age was the only factor to influence obesity risk at both time points.
Given that people today are heavier than they were four decades ago, and that women tend to gain more weight during pregnancy (averaging 30.5 pounds in 2003, compared to 22 pounds in the early 1960s), “these trends all point to dramatic long-term consequences for the prevalence of overweight in adulthood,” Terry and her team note.
Nevertheless, she added in an interview, the findings should not be interpreted as discouraging women from gaining enough weight during pregnancy. “Having a healthy weight gain and having a healthy size baby at birth is very important for reducing infant mortality,” Terry said.
The study is published in the American Journal of Epidemiology. In a related commentary, Drs. Matthew W. Gillman and Ken Kleinman of Harvard Medical School, write that “affecting gestational weight gain or perhaps infant weight gain, while daunting, seems within reach in the foreseeable future,” while targeting maternal body mass index to prevent obesity would be “a rather large challenge.”
Terry and her colleagues respond by warning that limiting weight gain in pregnancy carries many risks, including possibly even predisposing smaller birth weight infants to future obesity by promoting rapid growth in early childhood.
“Continued focus on maintaining a healthy body mass index throughout life, however, will improve a woman’s health and may ultimately prove to influence her offspring’s,” they conclude.
SOURCE: American Journal of Epidemiology, July 1, 2007.
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