A Novel Method to Describe Early Offspring Body Mass Index (BMI) Trajectories and to Study Its Determinants.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Accurately characterizing children's body mass index (BMI) trajectories and studying their determinants is a statistical challenge. There is a need to identify early public health measures for obesity prevention. We describe a method that allows studies of the determinants of height, weight and BMI growth up to five years of age. We illustrated this method using maternal smoking during pregnancy as one of the early-life factors that is potentially involved in prenatal programming of obesity.

Methods

Individual height and weight trajectories were fitted using the Jenss-Bayley model on 28,381 and 30,515 measurements, respectively, from 1,666 children to deduce BMI trajectories. We assessed global associations between smoking and growth trajectories and cross-section

SUBMITTER: Carles S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4915665 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature