The early life nutritional environment and early life stress as potential pathways towards the metabolic syndrome in mid-life? A lifecourse analysis using the 1958 British Birth cohort

Abstract

BackgroundLifecourse studies suggest that the metabolic syndrome (MetS) may be rooted in the early life environment. This study aims to examine the pathways linking early nutritional and psychosocial exposures and the presence of MetS in midlife.MethodsData are from the National Child Development Study including individuals born during 1 week in 1958 in Great Britain and followed-up until now. MetS was defined based on the National Cholesterol Education Program Adult Treatment Panel III classification. Mother’s pre-pregnancy body mass index (BMI) was used as a proxy of the early nutritional environment and Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) as a proxy for early psychosocial stress. Socioeconomic characteristics, pregnancy and birth conditions were extracted as potential confounders. Adult health behaviors, BMI, socioeconomic environment and psychological state were considered as mediating variables.Multivariate models were performed by including variables sequentially taking a lifecourse approach.Results37.5 % of men and 19.8 % of women had MetS. Participants with an obese/overweight mother presented a higher risk of MetS than those whose mother had a normal pre-pregnancy BMI. Men exposed to two ACE or more, and women exposed to one ACE, were more at risk of MetS compared to unexposed individuals. After including confounders and mediators, mother’s pre-pregnancy BMI was still associated with MetS in midlife but the association was weakened after including participant’s adult BMI. ACE was no longer associated with MetS after including confounders in models.ConclusionsThe early nutritional environment, represented by mother’s pre-pregnancy BMI, was associated with the risk of MetS in midlife. An important mechanism involves a mother-to-child BMI transmission, independent of birth or perinatal conditions, socioeconomic characteristics and health behaviors over the lifecourse. However this mechanism is not sufficient for explaining the influence of mother’s pre-pregnancy BMI which implies the need to further explore other mechanisms in particular the role of genetics and early nutritional environment. ACE is not independently associated with MetS. However, other early life stressful events such as emergency caesarean deliveries and poor socioeconomic status during childhood may contribute as determinants of MetS.

Model-based recursive partitioning to identify risk clusters for metabolic syndrome and its components: findings from the International Mobility in Aging Study

“…Better educated women from the middle-income sites likely had/have more money to afford obesogenic, westernised foods and over their lifetimes, may have engaged in less exercise, as educational attainment may have allowed them to ‘escape’ physically strenuous jobs. Consistent with other research, 32 early life adversity was associated to higher prevalence estimates of MetS; however, this association was only observed in men, whereas it has been observed in both men and women elsewhere. 32 The strong context specificity of our findings highlights the utility of using MOB to identify unique admixtures that might have been overlooked with traditional statistical techniques and/or would have been impossible to identify without a very large sample size.…”

“… 40 Finally, we did not collect individual dietary data or data on the early nutritional environment. 32 …”

Maternal prepregnancy BMI or weight and offspring's blood pressure: Systematic review

“…Although the available evidence did not support a direct link between MPBW and offspring's BP, this review identified indications for an indirect or mediated association: As shown by our adjustment handling, offspring's anthropometry may almost entirely explain the relation between MPBW and offspring's BP. Similarly, other thematically close, recently published studies point to such an indirect relation of MPBW with cardiometabolic risk factors such as metabolic syndrome (including BP, high‐density lipoprotein, triglycerides, waist circumference, and HbA1c; Delpierre et al, ) and cardiac structure (including left ventricular mass, left ventricular mass index, relative wall thickness, fractional shorting, and eccentric left ventricular hypertrophy; Toemen et al, ); the association attenuated into nonsignificance after adding participants' BMI to the multivariate model. Previous studies already described a strong relation of MPBW with higher rates of offspring's overweight or obesity (Pacce et al, ; Yu et al, ), whereas childhood BMI is in turn related to cardiometabolic outcomes (Black et al, ; Di Bonito et al, ), including BP (Friedemann et al, ; Onis et al, ).…”

Understanding the links between social ties and fitness over the life cycle in primates

“…Such early life parental and physical experiences can influence individual sociality in a number of ways, including future parental behaviour (Margulis et al, 2005;Champagne et al, 2006;Maestripieri et al, 2006;Champagne, 2008;Kappeler & Meaney, 2010), affiliative tendencies and partner preferences (Uchino, 2009;Hawkley et al, 2012;Branchi et al, 2013;Feldman et al, 2013;Ilany & Akçay, 2016;Tung et al, 2016;Jarrett et al, 2018), aggressive tendencies and dominance behaviour (Bastian et al, 2002;Sachser et al, 2011) and emotional regulation (Weaver & de Waal, 2003;Weaver et al, 2004;Allen et al, 2007;Branchi et al, 2009;Clay & de Waal, 2013). Early life experience can also influence survival (Tung et al, 2016;Alberts, 2018), reproductive success (Altmann, 1991;Margulis et al, 2005;Douhard et al, 2014), and risk of particular disease (Delpierre et al, 2016). This leads to the clear possibility that early life conditions influence both sociality and fitness simultaneously, and potentially drive a spurious correlation between them in adults.…”