No evidence of large differences in mother–daughter and father–son body mass index concordance in a large UK birth cohort

It has recently been suggested that there are substantial differences in mother–daughter and father–son associations of body mass index and obesity among contemporary UK children, but much larger studies of older cohorts have failed to find evidence of substantial sex-specific effects. We have teste...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:International Journal of Obesity 2010-07, Vol.34 (7), p.1191-1192
Main Authors: Leary, S, Davey Smith, G, Ness, A
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Age
Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children
Biological and medical sciences
Body Mass Index
boys
Child
Child, Preschool
Cohort Studies
Confidence intervals
daughters
Epidemiology
familial incidence
fathers
Female
Females
Gender
gender differences
girls
human nutrition
Humans
Hypotheses
Longitudinal studies
Male
Males
Medical research
Medical sciences
men
Metabolic diseases
mothers
Nuclear Family
nutritional status
Obesity
Obesity - epidemiology
Obesity in children
Oral hygiene
Parents & parenting
Physiological aspects
progeny
Risk factors
Sex Factors
sons
United Kingdom - epidemiology
women
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:It has recently been suggested that there are substantial differences in mother–daughter and father–son associations of body mass index and obesity among contemporary UK children, but much larger studies of older cohorts have failed to find evidence of substantial sex-specific effects. We have tested this hypothesis using the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, a large contemporary cohort. Our analyses are based on 4654 complete parent–offspring trios (2323 with male offspring and 2331 with female offspring, all aged approximately 7.5 years). We found maternal body mass index to be a little more strongly associated with female than with male offspring body mass index (β=0.18 (95% confidence interval 0.16–0.20) for females vs 0.13 (0.12, 0.15) for males). However, associations between paternal body mass index and male compared with female offspring were very similar (β=0.16 (0.14, 0.19) for females vs 0.15 (0.12, 0.17) for males). Hence, our study suggests that there is no compelling reason to integrate the belief that there are large differences in parent–offspring body mass index associations with obesity prevention strategies.
ISSN:0307-0565
1476-5497
DOI:10.1038/ijo.2010.60