ArticleInternational journal of epidemiology2019
Early life disadvantage and adult adiposity: tests of sensitive periods during childhood and behavioural mediation in adulthood.
Article in International journal of epidemiology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 14 citations in OpenAlex.
- Early life social conditions and adverse experiences are associated with childhood BMI and perceived overeating.Pediatric obesity · 2025Article
- Contributions of subjective status to eating behaviors, obesity, and metabolic health across development.Appetite · 2025Review
- Review
- Neighborhood Socioeconomic Deprivation in Early Childhood Mediates Racial Disparities in Blood Pressure in a College Student Sample.Journal of youth and adolescence · 2022Article
- Gut Microbiome over a Lifetime and the Association with Hypertension.Current hypertension reports · 2021Review
- Article
- Associations of types of green space across the life-course with blood pressure and body mass index.Environmental research · 2020Article
- Optimism and Social Support Predict Healthier Adult Behaviors Despite Socially Disadvantaged Childhoods.International journal of behavioral medicine · 2020Article
- Longitudinal associations of neighborhood socioeconomic status with cardiovascular risk factors: A 46-year follow-up study.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
10 authors at 5 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundEarly exposure to socioeconomic disadvantage is associated with obesity. Here we investigated how early, and conducted mediation analyses to identify behavioural factors in adulthood that could explain why.
methodsAmong 931 participants in the New England Family Study, we investigated the associations of family socioeconomic disadvantage measured before birth and at age 7 years with the following measures of adiposity in mid-adulthood (mean age = 44.4 years): body mass index (BMI), waist circumference and, among 400 participants, body composition from dual-energy X-ray absorption scans.
resultsIn linear regressions adjusting for age, sex, race and childhood BMI Z-score, participants in the highest tertile of socioeconomic disadvantage at birth had 2.6 additional BMI units in adulthood [95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.26, 3.96], 5.62 cm waist circumference (95% CI = 2.69, 8.55), 0.73 kg of android fat mass (95% CI = 0.25, 1.21), and 7.65 higher Fat Mass Index (95% CI = 2.22, 13.09). Conditional on disadvantage at birth, socioeconomic disadvantage at age 7 years was not associated with adult adiposity. In mediation analyses, 10-20% of these associations were explained by educational attainment and 5-10% were explained by depressive symptoms.
conclusionsInfancy may be a sensitive period for exposure to socioeconomic disadvantage, as exposure in the earliest years of life confers a larger risk for overall and central adiposity in mid-adulthood than exposure during childhood. Intervention on these two adult risk factors for adiposity would, if all model assumptions were satisfied, only remediate up to one-fifth of the excess adult adiposity among individuals born into socioeconomically disadvantaged households.
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