High-risk Growth Trajectory Related to Childhood Overweight/Obesity and Its Predictive Model at Birth

Context: Childhood obesity increases the risk of chronic disease in adulthood.

Objective: To construct an early predictive model for a growth trajectory that is highly related to childhood overweight/obesity.

Design: Prospective cohort study.

Settings: Shanghai Birth Cohort (SBC) and US Collaborative Perinatal Project (CPP).

Participants: A total of 848 mother-child pairs in the SBC (2013-2016) and 22 691 pairs in the CPP (1959-1965) with 2- and 7-year follow-up, respectively.

Main outcome measures: A high-risk postnatal growth trajectory intimately associated with childhood overweight/obesity and its predictive model.

Results: We demonstrated that the shifts of postnatal body mass index (BMI) percentile had been completed around 1 year of age and identified a high-risk growth trajectory that was closely related to overweight/obesity [odds ratio 6.5 (95% CI 5.9, 7.2)] at 7 years old. Children with this trajectory presented with a consistent BMI around the 85th percentile after the age of 1 year. It could be recognized early after birth using a predictive model with 4 metabolites (tyrosine, glycine, octenoylcarnitine, and stearoylcarnitine), combined with sex, birth weight, and maternal prepregnancy BMI. The model had an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.869 (95% CI 0.779, 0.932), a sensitivity of 83.3% (95% CI 51.6%, 97.9%), and a specificity of 81.1% (95% CI 70.3%, 89.3%) in the validation data set.

Conclusion: Children with postnatal high-risk growth trajectories were significantly associated with subsequent overweight/obesity at 7 years old. Metabolite profiles at birth combined with clinical measures were able to predict at-risk children before overweight/obesity occurrence.