Prenatal maternal cortisol, stress and anxiety, and childhood obesity at 5 years: a nested case–control study

ABSTRACT

Background

Paediatric obesity is a global public health issue. Prenatal maternal mental health is potentially implicated in the development of childhood obesity. This study examined associations between prenatal maternal cortisol, self-reported stress, anxiety and depression in the second trimester, and childhood overweight and obesity at 5 years of age.

Methods

A nested case–control study was conducted using data from the Irish prospective longitudinal birth cohort SCOPE BASELINE. Cases were children with overweight or obesity, operationalised as having a BMI z-score above +2 standard deviations. Controls were children with a BMI z-score between −0.5 and 0.5 standard deviations at 5 years of age. Two to one matching by sex was conducted. Thirty-eight cases and 83 sex-matched controls were included. Maternal serum cortisol concentration and self-reported stress, anxiety and depression were measured at 15 ± 1 and 20 ± 1 weeks gestation. Conditional logistic regression analyses were conducted to examine associations between prenatal maternal cortisol and self-reported stress, anxiety and depression, and childhood overweight and obesity.

Results

Despite some evidence for associations between anxiety and depression, and child BMI z-scores in univariate analyses, adjusted models indicated no associations between prenatal maternal stress (OR: 1.02, 95% CI: 0.94–1.12), anxiety (OR: 1.03, 95% CI: 0.97–1.09), depression (OR: 1.04, 95% CI: 0.91–1.19), or cortisol concentration (OR: 0.99, 95% CI: 0.99–1.00) and child BMI z-score.

Conclusion

Our findings do not provide support for associations between foetal exposure during the second trimester of pregnancy and maternal cortisol, stress and anxiety, and childhood overweight or obesity at 5 years of age.

KEYWORDS:

• Childhood obesity
• stress
• anxiety
• cortisol
• pregnancy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data are available from the SCOPE BASELINE cohort upon request to the INFANT Maternal and Child Health Research Centre, Cork, Ireland; [email protected]

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an HRB ARPP Fellowship (HRB-ARPP-A-2018-011). The SCOPE Ireland Study was supported by the Health Research Board, Ireland (grant number CSA 02/2007). The Cork BASELINE birth cohort study was funded by the National Children’s Research Centre, Dublin (NCRC) in 2008 and 2012. Emma Butler is supported by the HRB Structured Population and Health Services (SPHeRE) PhD program. The funders had no role in the design, conduct or reporting of this study.