Association Between Parental Social Position and Childhood Overweight: Mediation by Lifestyle and BMI Patterns During...

Area of Science:

• Pediatrics
• Public Health
• Epidemiology

Background:

• Children from lower socio-economic positions (SEP) or non-Western ethnic backgrounds experience disproportionately higher rates of obesity in high-income countries.
• Early childhood overweight is a growing public health concern with long-term health implications.

Purpose of the Study:

• To quantify the mediating role of parental lifestyle and Body Mass Index (BMI) patterns during pregnancy in the association between parental socio-economic factors and childhood overweight.
• To investigate these associations in two large European birth cohorts: the French Etude Longitudinale Française depuis l'Enfance (ELFE) and the Dutch Generation R.

Main Methods:

• Utilized counterfactual mediation analyses on data from 8584 children in the ELFE cohort and 6511 children in the Generation R cohort.
• Examined two key parental lifestyle/BMI patterns: "high parental smoking, poor-quality maternal diet, and sedentary behavior" and "high parental BMI and low gestational weight gain."

Main Results:

• These parental patterns jointly mediated 62.8% of the association between parental education and childhood overweight in ELFE and 23.2% in Generation R.
• In Generation R, the patterns mediated 8.9% of the association between parental geographic origin and childhood overweight.
• In ELFE, non-Western parents were less likely to exhibit the first pattern, leading to a negative indirect effect on childhood overweight.

Conclusions:

• Parental lifestyle and BMI during pregnancy are critical mediators in the development of socio-economic inequalities in childhood overweight.
• While parental factors explain some disparities related to socio-economic status, other unidentified factors likely contribute to inequalities associated with geographic origin.