Birth Weight and the Risk of Cardiovascular Disease in the Maternal Grandparents

Abstract

Pregnancy complications and cardiovascular disease share some common determinants. It has previously been hypothesized that family history of cardiovascular disease would be associated with low birth weight. Records from 120,317 Scottish births, 1992-2006, were linked to hospital admission and death certificate data for 71,681 pairs of maternal grandparents. There was a negative relation between the birth weight of the baby and the risk of either grandparent's experiencing ischemic heart disease (for a 1-kg increase in birth weight, hazard ratio = 0.86, 95% confidence interval: 0.83, 0.89) or cerebrovascular disease (hazard ratio = 0.82, 95% confidence interval: 0.77, 0.87). Further analysis demonstrated that the associations were explained by increased risks of both delivering a small-for-gestational-age infant and delivering preterm among women whose parents had experienced cardiovascular disease. Adjustment for the mother's characteristics at the time of the birth attenuated the relation, but significant associations persisted: With a 1-kg increase in birth weight, the adjusted hazard ratio for ischemic heart disease = 0.93 (95% confidence interval: 0.89, 0.96) and for cerebrovascular disease = 0.93 (95% confidence interval: 0.89, 0.96). Familial aggregation of common determinants of pregnancy complications and cardiovascular disease is the likely explanation for the relation between an infant's birth weight and the risk of cardiovascular disease in other family members.

Longitudinal follow-up of the relationship between dietary intake and growth and development in the Lifeways cross-generation cohort study 2001–2013

“…Preliminary analysis of these data reconfirm a positive association between higher birthweight and paternal grandfathers' mortality (121) . Our findings in relation to the maternal line were therefore broadly consistent with most other published studies (42,43) . Although the Norwegian linkage study shows GMS, General medical services; OR, odds ratio; prim, primary; sec, secondary; multip, multipara; nullip, nullipara.…”

“…There was evidence for an inverted U-shaped association between birth-weight of grandchildren and diabetes in paternal grandmothers. Smith et al (42) have shown an inverse relationship between maternal grandparents' risk of IHD or cerebrovascular disease and infant birth-weight and did not have data on paternal lineages. In a very large linkage study in Norway, inverse relationships were shown according to both maternal and paternal lineages and cardiovascular outcomes in grandparents; adjusting for maternal smoking accounted for much of the effect on cardiovascular mortality.…”

“…By contrast with parental data studies (28)(29)(30)(31)38,39) there are relatively fewer data on how grandparental characteristics affect their grandchildren's growth and development; all such studies have either been retrospective or data linkage in design and none to date had dietary intake data across generations. To date there are just four well-characterised human studies with three generations (40)(41)(42)(43) . Manor and Koupil (40) showed a U-shaped association between grandchild's birth-weight and circulatory disease mortality in maternal grandmothers only for infants born prior to 1977.…”

Pregnancy: An Underutilized Window of Opportunity to Improve Long-term Maternal and Infant Health—An Appeal for Continuous Family Care and Interdisciplinary Communication

“…Delivering an FGR infant is associated with maternal coronary artery disease, cerebrovascular disease, or cardiac insufficiency with HRs ranging from 1.35 to 3.4 for severe early-onset FGR (Table 2) (28). Birth weight has an inverse linear association with maternal CVD mortality and is also related to grandparental CVD and CVD mortality (29). These BW associations across generations are independent of socioeconomic, environmental, or behavioral factors, body mass index (BMI), age, or smoking status.…”

Evolution of menopausal hormone therapy: from standard to ultra-low doses

“…Огромный интерес представляют результаты крупно-масштабного когортного исследования EURAS-HRT, про-веденного в 7 европейских странах с участием более 30 000 женщин в постменопаузе (>100 000 женщин-лет наблюдения), что делает результаты данного исследо-вания по мощности сопоставимыми с таковыми WHI, несмотря на разный дизайн [17]. На фоне комбинации дроспиренон/эстрадиол выявлена отчетливая тенденция к снижению частоты РМЖ (скорректированное ОР 0,7; 95% ДИ 0,5-1,2).…”