ArticleEpigenetics2015
DNA methylation mediates the impact of exposure to prenatal maternal stress on BMI and central adiposity in children at age 13½ years: Project Ice Storm.
Article in Epigenetics, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 54 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
54 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 132 citations in OpenAlex.
- Impacts of climate change on childhood obesity: an updated systematic literature review.BMJ open · 2025Pooled it
- The Relationship between Psychological Stress and Anthropometric, Biological Outcomes: A Systematic Review.Medicina (Kaunas, Lithuania) · 2024Pooled it
- Parental Preconception Adversity and Offspring Health in African Americans: A Systematic Review of Intergenerational Studies.Trauma, violence & abuse · 2023Pooled it
- Trial
- Differential methylation at novel putative imprinting control regions on chromosome 20 associated with childhood obesity.Epigenetics · 2026Article
- Maternal Autoimmune Disease and Childhood-Onset Type 1 Diabetes: A Nationwide Population-Based Nested Case-Control Study.Pediatric diabetes · 2026Article
- Body Size and Risk of Death During the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in Alaska.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2025Article
- DNA Methylation Mediates the Association Between Prenatal Maternal Stress and the Broad Autism Phenotype in Human Adolescents: Project Ice Storm.International journal of molecular sciences · 2025Article
- Sex-specific role of epigenetic modification of a leptin upstream enhancer in adipose tissue.Clinical epigenetics · 2025Article
- Epigenetic signature of very low birth weight in young adult life.Pediatric research · 2025Article
- Childhood adversity, accelerated GrimAge, and associated health consequences.Journal of behavioral medicine · 2024Article
- The Association Between Prenatal Maternal Stress and Adolescent Affective Outcomes is Mediated by Childhood Maltreatment and Adolescent Behavioral Inhibition System Sensitivity.Child psychiatry and human development · 2024Article
- Biological and behavioral pathways from prenatal depression to offspring cardiometabolic risk: Testing the developmental origins of health and disease hypothesis.Developmental psychology · 2024Review
- Epigenetics of prenatal stress in humans: the current research landscape.Clinical epigenetics · 2024Review
- Genome-wide neonatal epigenetic changes associated with maternal exposure to the COVID-19 pandemic.BMC medical genomics · 2023Observational
- How can early life adversity still exert an effect decades later? A question of timing, tissues and mechanisms.Frontiers in immunology · 2023Review
- In utero exposure to the Great Depression is reflected in late-life epigenetic aging signatures.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Prenatal Maternal Distress During the COVID-19 Pandemic and Associations With Infant Brain Connectivity.Biological psychiatry · 2022Article
- The relation between prenatal stress, overweight and obesity in children diagnosed according to BMI and percentage fat tissue.Eating and weight disorders : EWD · 2022Article
- Toxicoepigenetics and Environmental Health: Challenges and Opportunities.Chemical research in toxicology · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Prenatal maternal stress (PNMS) in animals and humans predicts obesity and metabolic dysfunction in the offspring. Epigenetic modification of gene function is considered one possible mechanism by which PNMS results in poor outcomes in offspring. Our goal was to determine the role of maternal objective exposure and subjective distress on child BMI and central adiposity at 13½ years of age, and to test the hypothesis that DNA methylation mediates the effect of PNMS on growth. Mothers were pregnant during the January 1998 Quebec ice storm. We assessed their objective exposure and subjective distress in June 1998. At age 13½ their children were weighed and measured (n = 66); a subsample provided blood samples for epigenetic studies (n = 31). Objective and subjective PNMS correlated with central adiposity (waist-to-height ratio); only objective PNMS predicted body mass index (BMI). Bootstrapping analyses showed that the methylation level of genes from established Type-1 and -2 diabetes mellitus pathways showed significant mediation of the effect of objective PNMS on both central adiposity and BMI. However, the negative mediating effects indicate that, although greater objective PNMS predicts greater BMI and adiposity, this effect is dampened by the effects of objective PNMS on DNA methylation, suggesting a protective role of the selected genes from Type-1 and -2 diabetes mellitus pathways. We provide data supporting that DNA methylation is a potential mechanism involved in the long-term adaptation and programming of the genome in response to early adverse environmental factors.
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