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=

Background: 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.

Objective: 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.

Methods: 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.

Results: 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.

Conclusions: 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.