Maternal, paternal obesity at age 17 years tied to fivefold higher odds of offspring obesity at age 17 years
By Lori Solomon HealthDay Reporter
FRIDAY, July 12, 2024 (HealthDay News) — The weight status of parents at 17 years of age is associated with obesity risk for both female and male offspring, according to a study published online June 28 in JAMA Network Open.
Gabriel Chodick, Ph.D., from Tel Aviv University in Israel, and colleagues assessed the heritability of obesity. The analysis included 447,883 offspring measured for body mass index (BMI) at 17 years of age and their parents (1.3 million individuals total).
The researchers found that the correlation between midparental BMI percentile at 17 years of age and offsprings’ BMI at 17 years of age was moderate (Ï = 0.386). For female offspring, the maternal-offspring BMI correlation (Ï = 0.329) was somewhat higher than the paternal-offspring BMI correlation (Ï = 0.266). Among triads in which both parents had a healthy BMI, the prevalence of overweight or obesity in offspring was 15.4 percent, which increased to 76.6 percent when both parents had obesity and decreased to 3.3 percent when both parents had severe underweight. Maternal (odds ratio [OR], 4.96), paternal (OR, 4.48), and parental (OR, 6.44) obesity (midparent BMI in the ≥95th percentile) at 17 years of age were associated with increased odds of obesity among offspring compared with healthy weight.
“The observed correlation between midparental and offspring BMI, coupled with a calculated narrow-sense heritability of 39 percent, suggested a substantive contribution of genetic factors to BMI variation at 17 years of age,” the authors write.
One author disclosed ties to the pharmaceutical industry.
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