AUTHOR=dos Santos Constança Soares , Picoito João , Nunes Carla , Loureiro Isabel 

TITLE=Early Individual and Family Predictors of Weight Trajectories From Early Childhood to Adolescence: Results From the Millennium Cohort Study

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Pediatrics

VOLUME=8

YEAR=2020

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/pediatrics/articles/10.3389/fped.2020.00417

DOI=10.3389/fped.2020.00417

ISSN=2296-2360

ABSTRACT=<p><bold>Background:</bold> Early infancy and childhood are critical periods in the establishment of lifelong weight trajectories. Parents and early family environment have a strong effect on children's health behaviors that track into adolescence, influencing lifelong risk of obesity.</p><p><bold>Objective:</bold> We aimed to identify developmental trajectories of body mass index (BMI) from early childhood to adolescence and to assess their early individual and family predictors.</p><p><bold>Methods:</bold> This was a secondary analysis of the Millennium Cohort Study and included 17,165 children. Weight trajectories were estimated using growth mixture modeling based on age- and gender-specific BMI Z-scores, followed by a bias-adjusted regression analysis.</p><p><bold>Results:</bold> We found four BMI trajectories: Weight Loss (69%), Early Weight Gain (24%), Early Obesity (3.7%), and Late Weight Gain (3.3%). Weight trajectories were mainly settled by early adolescence. Lack of sleep and eating routines, low emotional self-regulation, child-parent conflict, and low child-parent closeness in early childhood were significantly associated with unhealthy weight trajectories, alongside poverty, low maternal education, maternal obesity, and prematurity.</p><p><bold>Conclusions:</bold> Unhealthy BMI trajectories were defined in early and middle-childhood, and disproportionally affected children from disadvantaged families. This study further points out that household routines, self-regulation, and child-parent relationship are possible areas for family-based obesity prevention interventions.</p>