Genetic confounding in the association of early motor development with childhood and adolescent exercise behavior

Early motor development has been found to be a predictor of exercise behavior in children and adolescents, but whether this reflects a causal effect or confounding by genetic or shared environmental factors remains to be established.

For 20,911 complete twin pairs from the Netherlands Twin Register a motor development score was obtained from maternal reports on the timing of five motor milestones. During a 12-year follow-up, subsamples of the mothers reported on the twins' ability to perform seven gross motor skills ability (N = 17,189 pairs), and weekly minutes of total metabolic equivalents of task (MET) spent on sports and exercise activities at age 7 (N = 3632 pairs), age 10 (N = 3735 pairs), age 12 (N = 7043 pairs), and age 14 (N = 3990 pairs). Multivariate phenotypic and genetic regression analyses were used to establish the predictive strength of the two motor development traits for future exercise behavior, the contribution of genetic and shared environmental factors to the variance in all traits, and the contribution of familial confounding to the phenotypic prediction.

Significant heritability (h²) and shared environmental (c²) effects were found for early motor development in boys and girls (h² = 43-65%; c² = 16-48%). For exercise behavior, genetic influences increased with age (boys: h²_age7 = 22% to h²_age14 = 51%; girls: h²_age7 = 3% to h²_age14 = 18%) paired to a parallel decrease in the influence of the shared environment (boys: c²_age7 = 68% to c²_age14 = 19%; girls: c²_age7 = 80% to c²_age14 = 48%). Early motor development explained 4.3% (p < 0.001) of the variance in future exercise behavior in boys but only 1.9% (p < 0.001) in girls. If the effect in boys was due to a causal effect of motor development on exercise behavior, all of the factors influencing motor development would, through the causal chain, also influence future exercise behavior. Instead, only the genetic parts of the regression of exercise behavior on motor development were significant. Shared and unique environmental parts of the regression were largely non-significant, which is at odds with the causal hypothesis.

No support was found for a direct causal effect in the association between rapid early motor development on future exercise behavior. In boys, early motor development appears to be an expression of the same genetic factors that underlie the heritability of childhood and early adolescent exercise behavior.