Early overweight and pubertal maturation—pathways of association with young adults’ overweight: a longitudinal study

Abstract

Objective: Objectives of this study were to examine the prospective association of childhood body mass index (BMI) and overweight and pubertal stages with BMI and overweight in early adulthood independent of each other. Design: A population-based prospective birth cohort. Subjects: We used a population-based prospective birth cohort of 2897 (52% men) young adults who were born during 1981-1983 in Brisbane, Australia, and for whom we had puberty stages using Tanner scale at 14 years and measured BMI at 5 years of age. Main outcome measures: Pubertal stages at adolescent and BMI and its categories at 21 years. Results: We found that increasing BMI and overweight at 5 years of age predict the advanced stages of puberty. An advanced stage of puberty predicts young adults' BMI and overweight status at 21 years. When taking both childhood BMI and pubertal status into consideration, we found that being overweight at 5 years substantively increases BMI at 21 years, regardless of the stage of puberty reported at 14 years. We also found that subjects with normal BMI at 5 years but with higher stages of puberty at 14 years had threefolds greater risk to be overweight at 21 years compared with their counterparts. All associations remained consistent after controlling for potential confounders. Conclusions: Although this study underscores the impact of both child overweight and pubertal development on young adults' obesity, the mechanism that further explains the impact of puberty needs to be identified.

Sexual Selection and Life History: Earlier Recalled Puberty Predicts Men’s Phenotypic Masculinization

“…We replicated previous findings that earlier pubertal timing is associated with higher adult BMI (Kindblom et al 2006;Mamun et al 2009;Widen et al 2012) (Fig. 1b).…”

“…Because research has shown that men's muscularity, strength, and facial and vocal characteristics are especially likely to have been targets of sexual selection (Hill et al 2013;Lassek and Gaulin 2009;Doll et al 2014), we focused on these traits. We also attempted to replicate previous associations with mental rotation ability (Beltz and Berenbaum 2013) and BMI (Mamun et al 2009;Widen et al 2012).…”

“…Earlier puberty in males has been associated with higher adult body mass index (BMI, Mamun et al 2009;Widen et al 2012), which is slightly higher in men than in women (Lassek and Gaulin 2009). However, a high BMI could reflect either greater body fat or muscle mass, which are sexually dimorphic in opposite directions (Wells 2007), so this effect of pubertal timing on sex typicality remains unclear.…”

Review of Trimester-Specific Gestational Weight Gain and Childhood Adiposity

“…Similar to Oken et al's study, off spring of mothers with excessive weight gain during pregnancy, as defi ned by the IOM, were more likely to be overweight (OR=1.3, 95% CI: 1.0 to 1.8) and obese (OR=1.5, 95% CI: 1.0 to 2.1) at 21 years of age compared with those with inadequate weight gain. Although there was a posi ve associa on with adequate GWG and risk of overweight or obesity at age 21 years, results were insignifi cant 11 .…”

“…As excessive gesta onal weight gain (GWG) has been correlated with childhood and later in life overweight and obesity, the importance of appropriate GWG has gained increasing a en on in recent mes [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] . Mo vated by recent research on the changing characteris cs of the child-bearing popula on, the Ins tute of Medicine (IOM) revised GWG guidelines in 2009 to include a specifi c recommenda on for obese women, This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.…”