Early Individual and Family Predictors of Weight Trajectories From Early Childhood to Adolescence: Results From the Millennium Cohort Study

Frontiers in Pediatrics

article

Constança Soares dos Santos¹  João Picoito³  Carla Nunes²  Isabel Loureiro² 

[1] Department of Pediatrics, Centro Hospitalar Universitário Cova da Beira;Universidade NOVA de Lisboa;Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Centro Hospitalar e Universitário de Coimbra

关键词: weight trajectories;    early childhood;    family context;    Millennium Cohort Study;    growth mixture modeling;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fped.2020.00417

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Background: Early infancy and childhood are critical periods in the establishment of lifelong weight trajectories. Parents and early family environment have a strong effect on children's health behaviors that track into adolescence, influencing lifelong risk of obesity. Objective: We aimed to identify developmental trajectories of body mass index (BMI) from early childhood to adolescence and to assess their early individual and family predictors. Methods: This was a secondary analysis of the Millennium Cohort Study and included 17,165 children. Weight trajectories were estimated using growth mixture modeling based on age- and gender-specific BMI Z-scores, followed by a bias-adjusted regression analysis. Results: We found four BMI trajectories: Weight Loss (69%), Early Weight Gain (24%), Early Obesity (3.7%), and Late Weight Gain (3.3%). Weight trajectories were mainly settled by early adolescence. Lack of sleep and eating routines, low emotional self-regulation, child-parent conflict, and low child-parent closeness in early childhood were significantly associated with unhealthy weight trajectories, alongside poverty, low maternal education, maternal obesity, and prematurity. Conclusions: Unhealthy BMI trajectories were defined in early and middle-childhood, and disproportionally affected children from disadvantaged families. This study further points out that household routines, self-regulation, and child-parent relationship are possible areas for family-based obesity prevention interventions.

【 授权许可】

CC BY