Intergenerational Educational Attainment and Cardiometabolic Health in Latino Individuals Living in the United States

Abstract

Objective This study aimed to estimate the association between cycles of poverty, measured by intergenerational educational attainment (IEA), and the burden of obesity and metabolic dysfunction among Hispanic/Latino individuals in the United States. Methods This is a cross‐sectional study utilizing data from 392 adults linked to 286 biologic parents from the Niños Lifestyle and Diabetes Study and the Sacramento Area Latino Study on Aging. The educational attainment of parents and offspring was dichotomized in order to categorize IEA. Outcomes included obesity and metabolic syndrome (MetS). Model‐based standardization with population weights was used to compare obesity and MetS across generations, and Poisson regression was used to estimate prevalence ratios by IEA. Results A higher prevalence of obesity and MetS was observed in offspring (54% and 69%, respectively) compared with their parents (48% and 42%, respectively). Compared with stable‐low IEA, any category with high offspring education was associated with lower obesity and MetS prevalence. The upwardly mobile group saw the greatest benefit; they were 38% (95% CI: 10%‐57%) and 46% (95% CI: 21%‐63%) less likely to have obesity or MetS. Conclusions IEA strongly patterns cardiometabolic health among Hispanic/Latino individuals living in the United States, suggesting that promotion of higher education is associated with reductions in obesity and MetS, potentially benefitting future generations of this population.

Beyond borders: A commentary on the benefit of promoting immigrant populations in genome-wide association studies

“… 6 The Developmental Origins of Health and Disease hypothesis posits that biological programming (or embedding) of healthier in utero or early-life environments may in part explain this apparent “paradox.” 16 Second, the accumulative disadvantage model posits that exposures across the life course cumulatively pattern later life health. This model has been implicated with socioeconomic factors and cardiometabolic health in Latino immigrant families in our own research 17 and others’ (for example in Refs. 18 , 19 , 20 ).…”