“…To correct our statistical model, we included different covariates that have been shown to affect both mode of birth and the offspring's DNAm: maternal age at childbirth (calculated from entries at 8 weeks postpartum, Dunn et al, 2017;Sharami et al, 2022), maternal education (Alfano et al, 2019;Ryding et al, 2016), maternal smoking (Richmond et al, 2015) during the last 2 months of pregnancy (informed by mothers 8 weeks postpartum), child sex (Yousefi et al, 2015), and declared child gestational week at birth (Merid et al, 2020). Maternal ethnicity and prepregnancy body mass index (BMI; calculated from height and weight measures at 12 weeks gestation) were not included as covariates because of a lack of variability in ethnicity (98.74% White) and a large number of missing values (n = 168) regarding BMI.…”