The association between parents’ body mass index (BMI) and their children’s childhood BMI may be primarily due to genetic inheritance rather than to any direct biological effect of parental weight during pregnancy, according to a new study published in the open access journal PLOS Medicine by Tom Bond of the University of Bristol, UK, and colleagues from the University of Queensland, Australia and more.
Researchers analysed data from the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study, a prospective birth cohort of children born between 1999 and 2009.
Maternal BMI was more strongly associated with offspring birth weight than paternal BMI, consistent with an effect of maternal body weight on birthweight through the environment inside the uterus. However, after birth the associations of maternal and paternal BMI with offspring BMI were broadly similar from age two to eight. Models showed that genetic effects explained an estimated 79% of the statistical association between a mother’s BMI and her child’s BMI at age 8, and 94% of the association for fathers. Higher parental BMI was also associated with obesity-related eating behaviours in children, including greater food responsiveness and emotional overeating, although the study was not able to conclusively determine how much of this was genetically driven.
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