Objective: To assess the longitudinal association between parental BMI and offspring's BMI, in EPACI Portugal 2012.
Design: Longitudinal study with retrospective collection of children's anthropometry data since birth. Children's anthropometric data were gathered from individual child health bulletins, and parents' anthropometrics were self-reported. Children's and parents' BMI were classified according to WHO cut-offs. Linear mixed models with random intercept and slope for age were applied to quantify the association between parental BMI and children BMI Z-score (zBMI).
Setting: EPACI Portugal 2012.
Participants: Representative sample from the Portuguese population (n 2230) aged from 12 to 36 months.
Results: 58·9 % of the fathers and 35·6 % of the mothers were overweight (OW) or obese. Prevalence of infants who were, at least, at risk of OW increased from 17·0 % to 30·3 % since birth to 12 months. About half of the mothers with pre-pregnancy OW and obesity (OB) gained gestational weight above the recommendations. The children from mothers with gestational weight gain (GWG) below the recommendations showed a -0·15 SD lower zBMI (95 % CI -0·23, -0·06) in early life, comparing with mothers within GWG recommendations. Children of obese mothers were more likely to present a higher zBMI (0·24 SD, 95 % CI 0·13, 0·35) throughout the first months of life.
Conclusions: A high prevalence of OW and OB was observed in Portuguese young adults and toddlers. Mothers' pre-pregnancy BMI and insufficient GWG had a direct effect on offspring BMI. Early effective interventions are needed in order to prevent the transgenerational transmission of OB.EPACI Portugal 2012 was funded by Nutricia Early Life Nutrition. The work of M.N. was supported by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia through the PhD Grant SFRH/BD/89293/2012. This work was supported by National Funds from FCT through project UIDB/Multi/50016/2020. Nutricia Early Life Nutrition and FCT had no role in the article elaboration, as well as in its design or analysis
