Kids born to obese parents may be more likely to experience certain developmental delays early in childhood, a recent study suggests.
Based on parents' reports, children with obese mothers were 67 percent more likely to have delayed fine motor skill development by age 3 compared to kids with normal or underweight mothers, even after accounting for the father's weight, the study found. With obese fathers, children were 71 percent more likely to have deficits in personal and social skills after taking their mothers' weight into account, the study also found.
When both parents were obese, kids were almost three times more likely to struggle with problem-solving.
"The immediate take home message is that everyone - male or female, contemplating parenthood or not - should try to achieve a healthy body weight, through appropriate diet and lifestyle," said lead study author Edwina Yeung, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health.The study assessed delays based on questionnaires completed by parents, and so it can't prove that obesity directly causes developmental problems, Yeung added by email.
"We don't have actual diagnoses for the kids," Yeung said. "At this point, we don't know whether the kids will have problems, or whether they'll outgrow what we found on the (screening questionnaires)."
Yeung and colleagues examined data from questionnaires parents completed for 3,759 singleton babies and 1,062 non-related twins, when the children were 4, 8, 12, 18, 24, 30 and 36 months old.
Researchers examined the odds of developmental delays associated with parental obesity after accounting for other factors that can impact these milestones such as parents' age, race or ethnicity, education and income levels, marital status, health insurance and smoking history.