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Gender-assortative weight gain: reply to Leary, Smith and Ness

International Journal of Obesity volume 35, page 150 (2011)Cite this article

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In the July 2009 issue of IJO, the EarlyBird study1 reported a strong gender-assortative relationship such that, at the age of 8 years, the daughters (but not the sons) of obese mothers were some 10-fold more likely to be obese than those of normal-weight mothers, and the sons (but not the daughters) of obese fathers some sixfold more likely. The phenomenon was dynamic (it strengthened over time), and the effect size of the gender interaction at ∼1.2 is perhaps the largest reported in childhood obesity. Indeed, the offspring of same-sex normal-weight parents were no heavier than the standards of 1990 based on children born 30 years ago. The findings suggest that contemporary childhood obesity is largely confined to the offspring of obese same-sex parents and it sits comfortably with the observation that, although the mean body mass index (BMI) of pre-pubertal children has risen substantially in a generation, the median has barely changed.

In a cautious response (‘No evidence of large differences in mother–daughter and father–son body mass index concordance in a large UK birth cohort’),2 the ALSPAC team examined a cross-section of their cohort at 8 years, and again found a gender-assortative relationship—albeit a weak one confined to mothers and daughters. However, rather than look for differences as their title suggests, the analysis was restricted to association, and cannot be expected to end up with the same result. The interest lies not in the correlation of BMI between all mothers and their daughters (or all sons and their fathers), but in the proportion of obese children whose same-sex parents are obese. The association of BMI within families (gender-matched or otherwise) is relatively weak, as we ourselves pointed out, but the provenance of obesity that we reported among the offspring was strong, justifying our conclusion that ‘Childhood obesity today appears to be largely confined to those whose same-sex parents are obese…….’

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References

  1. Perez-Pastor EM, Metcalf BS, Hosking J, Jeffery AN, Voss LD, Wilkin TJ . Assortative weight gain in mother-daughter and father-son pairs: an emerging source of childhood obesity. Longitudinal study of trios (EarlyBird 43). Int J Obes (Lond) 2009; 33: 727–735.

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  1. For the EarlyBird Team,

    T Wilkin

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  1. T Wilkin
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Wilkin, T. Gender-assortative weight gain: reply to Leary, Smith and Ness. Int J Obes 35, 150 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/ijo.2010.167

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