Intergenerational obesity: do early adversity and pregnancy explain disparities?

How do maternal early life experiences and the maternal weight before, during and after pregnancy, contribute, individually and jointly, to the development of maternal and child obesity? The “Intergenerational obesity: do early adversity and pregnancy explain disparities?” project will investigate how early social environment operates through maternal pregnancy-related weight to increase women’s BMI at mid-life; how a mother’s early social environment operates through maternal weight before, during and after pregnancy to influence offspring BMI; and how a history of maternal adverse childhood beyond early social environment increase maternal pregnancy weight which in turn influences long-term BMI of women and their children.

Minority women and their children carry an undue burden of the obesity epidemic. Examining these relationships by race-ethnicity in the nationally representative National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) sample will clarify the role of these exposures in obesity disparities, and open the door for development of novel approaches to prevent obesity and reduce racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities.