Relationship of equol production between children aged 5-7 years and their mothers

The factors responsible for the production of isoflavone metabolites have not yet been identified. We aimed to examine the relationships of equol production between mother and child in a birth cohort in Japan.

Subjects were a part of the participants in a longitudinal study on pregnant women and their offspring. When children were 5-7 years old, mothers and children were asked to reply to a questionnaire on lifestyles and a 3-day child's dietary record. Mothers and children were given a bar-shaped soy snack (Soyjoy^®) daily on two consecutive days (soy challenge). The snack contained 14 mg of overall soy isoflavones as the sum of aglycones and the glucosides for mothers and 7.5 mg for children. On the morning of day 0 and 3, they were asked to mail their first-void urines. Urinary isoflavone metabolites of 159 mother-child pairs were measured by a high-performance liquid chromatography method.

Equol producers were 35.5 % among mothers and 13.8 % among children. Equol producer status of a child was neither associated with dietary intake nor with urinary levels of daidzein and genistein. After multiple adjustments for potential confounders, the estimated relative risk of equol producer was 2.75 (95 % confidence interval 1.00, 7.52) among children whose mother was an equol producer, compared with children whose mother was a non-producer.

Child's equol production was associated with the mother's equol producer status. The effects of maternal factors on child's equol production should be studied further.