How parental lifestyle during pregnancy contribute to social inequalities in childhood overweight?
In high-income countries, children born to immigrant parents or to parents with a lower socioeconomic position are disproportionately affected by the risk of overweight, starting as early as the preschool years. We assessed the extent to which parental lifestyle patterns during pregnancy explain these early inequalities.
As part of the European EndObesity project, we analyzed data from over 15,000 five-year-old children from two large birth cohorts: the French ELFE cohort (n=8,584) and the Dutch Generation R cohort (n=6,511). Using counterfactual mediation analyses, we examined the mediating (indirect) effect of two previously identified lifestyle-related patterns during pregnancy. The first, a multi-behavioral pattern, was characterized by high parental smoking, poor maternal diet quality, and high sedentary behavior; the second by high parental body mass index and low gestational weight gain.
Our results showed that these two patterns jointly explained a substantial proportion of the association between parental education level and childhood overweight risk: 62.8% in the French cohort and 23.2% in the Dutch cohort. In contrast, these patterns mediated only 8.9% of the association between migration status and childhood overweight, and only in Generation R. In fact, in ELFE, immigrant parents displayed healthier behaviors, resulting in a negative indirect effect of the multi-behavioral pattern.
Our findings highlight that parental lifestyles during pregnancy could serve as important levers for reducing socioeconomic inequalities in childhood overweight. However, other, yet unidentified, factors appear to contribute to inequalities related to migration status, pointing to the need for further research to better understand and address these early determinants of health.
- Publication scientifique : Le Gal C, Schipper MC, Lecorguillé M, Pavicic L, Simeon T, Charles M, et al. Association Between Parental Social Position and Childhood Overweight: Mediation by Lifestyle and BMI Patterns During Pregnancy. Pediatric Obesity. 2025 Nov;20(11):e70047. doi: 10.1111/ijpo.70047
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40764897/
By Camille Le Gal
