ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Life-course trajectories of body mass index from adolescence to old age: Racial and educational disparities.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 70 papers.
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Who cites it
70 citing papers in PubMed, 108 citations in OpenAlex.
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- State Policy Liberalism in Adolescence and Risk for Dementia from 2000 to 2016 among Older U.S. Adults.Journal of health and social behavior · 2026Article
- Statistical methods for retrospective harmonization of longitudinal epidemiological data: a scoping review.European journal of epidemiology · 2026Article
- Genetic and environmental influences on educational disparities in adult weight change: an individual-based pooled analysis of 11 twin cohorts.International journal of obesity (2005) · 2026Article
- Age-related changes in adiposity and cardiometabolic disease risk: a longitudinal and prospective study in the UK Biobank.International journal of obesity (2005) · 2026Article
- Aging and metabolism contribute separately to brain-body health.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Association between obesity and subsequent risk of myasthenia gravis: a nationwide population-based cohort study.Acta neurologica Belgica · 2026Article
- Real-world obesity prevalence and history in 79 271 patients receiving systemic anticancer therapy across 13 cancer types in England (2013-2023).ESMO real world data and digital oncology · 2026Article
- Trends and Disparities in Clinician Diagnosis of Overweight and Obesity.Journal of general internal medicine · 2026Article
- Malnutrition among men in Ghana: socio-demographic factors and rural-urban differences.Journal of health, population, and nutrition · 2026Article
- Multimorbidity and functioning disparities in retired older adults: longitudinal trajectories, disease clusters, and mediating mechanisms.BMC geriatrics · 2026Article
- Genetic and environmental effects on weight gain from young adulthood to old age and its association with body mass index in early young adulthood: an individual-based pooled analysis of 16 twin cohorts.International journal of obesity (2005) · 2026Article
- From checkups to change: Longitudinal changes in lifestyle-related factors following repeated occupational health assessments among 106 005 Swedish workers.Scandinavian journal of work, environment & health · 2026Article
- Obesity from Childhood to Mid-adulthood in the United States: A Synthetic Cohort Approach to Measuring Health Trajectories.Epidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Adiposity trajectories from ages 11 to 22 years: 1993 Pelotas (Brazil) birth cohort.Cadernos de saude publica · 2026Article
- A cross-national comparison of obesity using body mass index-for-age percentiles: results from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging and the United States Health and Retirement Study.American journal of epidemiology · 2025Article
- It is not what you weigh, it is how you present it: body size, attractiveness, physical functioning, and access to partnership and sexuality for older men and women.Social forces; a scientific medium of social study and interpretation · 2025Article
- Evaluation of bronchial hyperresponsiveness in asthmatic paediatric patients using mannitol challenge test - Impacts of body mass index.Annals of medicine · 2025Article
- An Introduction to Longitudinal Synthetic Cohorts for Studying the Life Course Drivers of Health Outcomes and Inequalities in Older Age.Current epidemiology reports · 2025Article
10 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
No research exists on how body mass index (BMI) changes with age over the full life span and social disparities therein. This study aims to fill the gap using an innovative life-course research design and analytic methods to model BMI trajectories from early adolescence to old age across 20th-century birth cohorts and test sociodemographic variation in such trajectories. We conducted the pooled integrative data analysis (IDA) to combine data from four national population-based NIH longitudinal cohort studies that collectively cover multiple stages of the life course (Add Health, MIDUS, ACL, and HRS) and estimate mixed-effects models of age trajectories of BMI for men and women. We examined associations of BMI trajectories with birth cohort, race/ethnicity, parental education, and adult educational attainment. We found higher mean levels of and larger increases in BMI with age across more recent birth cohorts as compared with earlier-born cohorts. Black and Hispanic excesses in BMI compared with Whites were present early in life and persisted at all ages, and, in the case of Black-White disparities, were of larger magnitude for more recent cohorts. Higher parental and adulthood educational attainment were associated with lower levels of BMI at all ages. Women with college-educated parents also experienced less cohort increase in mean BMI. Both race and education disparities in BMI trajectories were larger for women compared with men.
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