Prenatal Parental Separation and Body Weight, Including Development of Overweight and Obesity Later in Childhood

Abstract

BackgroundEarly parental separation may be a stress factor causing a long-term alteration in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal-axis activity possibly impacting on the susceptibility to develop overweight and obesity in offspring. We aimed to examine the body mass index (BMI) and the risk of overweight and obesity in children whose parents lived separately before the child was born.MethodsA follow-up study was conducted using data from the Aarhus Birth Cohort in Denmark and included 2876 children with measurements of height and weight at 9-11-years-of-age, and self-reported information on parental cohabitation status at child birth and at 9-11-years-of-age. Quantile regression was used to estimate the difference in median BMI between children whose parents lived separately (n = 124) or together (n = 2752) before the birth. We used multiple logistic regression to calculate odds ratio (OR) for overweight and obesity, adjusted for gender, parity, breast feeding status, and maternal pre-pregnancy BMI, weight gain during pregnancy, age and educational level at child birth; with and without possible intermediate factors birth weight and maternal smoking during pregnancy. Due to a limited number of obese children, OR for obesity was adjusted for the a priori confounder maternal pre-pregnancy BMI only.ResultsThe difference in median BMI was 0.54 kg/m2 (95% confidence intervals (CI): 0.10; 0.98) between children whose parents lived separately before birth and children whose parents lived together. The risk of overweight and obesity was statistically significantly increased in children whose parents lived separately before the birth of the child; OR 2.29 (95% CI: 1.18; 4.45) and OR 2.81 (95% CI: 1.05; 7.51), respectively. Additional, adjustment for possible intermediate factors did not substantially change the estimates.ConclusionParental separation before child birth was associated with higher BMI, and increased risk of overweight and obesity in 9-11-year-old children; this may suggest a fetal programming effect or unmeasured difference in psychosocial factors between separated and non-separated parents.

A scoping review of epidemiologic risk factors for pediatric obesity: Implications for future childhood obesity and dental caries prevention research

“…Two studies found that smaller household size was a risk factor, whereas another study found the opposite. One study found that parents who lived separately before the birth of child (versus together) were more likely to have a child identified as obese.…”

Systematic review and meta-analysis on the relationship between prenatal stress and metabolic syndrome intermediate phenotypes

“…1. Full text review yielded 24 publications for inclusion into the systematic review and meta-analyses [35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58]. The list of excluded studies with reasons for exclusion is available in SI 5.…”

Stress and Androgen Activity During Fetal Development

“…In our published work on prenatal stress and AGD, relationships were stronger in relation to couple's combined stress (83). We discuss possible explanations in that article 3. Models are stratified by infant sex and adjust for study center, creatinine, age at examination, and weight-for-age Z-score.…”

“…According to this model, in utero exposures can play a significant role in shaping future physiology and there is particular interest in how prenatal stress 1 may influence fetal development, leading to altered childhood outcomes. Thousands of studies in humans and animal models have examined these issues, focusing on outcomes ranging from immune function (1,2) to metabolism (3,4). The influence of maternal stress can be seen even during fetal development (5,6) and can be long-lasting, persisting into adulthood (7,8).…”