ArticleMaternal and child health journal2021
Prenatal Stress and Early Childhood Body Mass Index: A Path Analysis Approach.
Article in Maternal and child health journal, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 10 citations in OpenAlex.
- Parental and Provider Perceptions of Social Care Impacts on Infant Nutrition.Childhood obesity (Print) · 2026Article
- Associations of birth size with BMI trajectories and fluctuation across adolescence and adulthood: A longitudinal study of two Finnish twin cohorts.Early human development · 2025Article
- Contributions of subjective status to eating behaviors, obesity, and metabolic health across development.Appetite · 2025Review
- The role of prenatal violence exposure in the development of disparities in children's adiposity from birth to middle childhood.Obesity (Silver Spring, Md.) · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
objectivesStress experienced by mothers during the prenatal period can have negative impacts on offspring development. Elevated BMI in childhood in response to early stress experience is a particularly critical outcome of interest since high BMI in childhood is associated with diabetes, heart disease and stroke in later life. The primary objective of this study was to analyze pathways between prenatal stress and early childhood BMI at 54-months of age and to begin to explore ethnic variations in these pathways.
methodsThis study used the Growing Up in New Zealand (GUiNZ) dataset, which is a longitudinal, representative birth cohort study that began with recruiting pregnant women in 2009 and 2010 in Auckland, New Zealand. Path analysis modeling was used to explore risk and protective pathways between prenatal maternal stress and early childhood body mass index (BMI) at 54-months of age and differences by ethnicity (n = 5510).
resultsPrenatal stress was positively associated with early childhood BMI at 54-months and maternal nutrition behaviors and length of exclusive breastfeeding mediated this direct relationship (χ CONCLUSIONS FOR PRACTICE: These findings contribute to the understanding of the intergenerational transmission of stress with respect to early childhood obesity. Reducing early stress exposure and/or addressing mediating and moderating factors linking stress experience with obesity development may prove to be more effective than attempting to alter health behaviors and trajectories in adulthood.
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Registered trials
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