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  • Letter to the Editor
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Reply to Wilkin

International Journal of Obesity volume 35, pages 151–152 (2011)Cite this article

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In response to the letter from the EarlyBird Team, we report further analyses based on ALSPAC data.

In his letter, Terry Wilkin states that ‘interest lies not in the correlation of body mass index (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’. This is a peculiar assertion, given that, in the original paper,1 Tables 2, 3a, 3b, 3c and Figures 1 and 2 relate to continuous BMI measures (as we use in our paper2), and only Figure 3 relates to obesity. Nevertheless, we have used the same definitions as Wilkin et al. to derive obesity variables for ALSPAC mothers, fathers and their offspring (at around 7.5 years of age). We found that daughters of obese mothers were 8.5-fold more likely to be obese than those of normal-weight mothers, but that sons were 10-fold more likely to be obese if their mothers were obese. The likelihood of obesity if the father was obese compared with normal weight was the same (sixfold) for both sons and daughters. Hence, our results for same-sex parent–offspring obesity associations are similar to those reported in the EarlyBird Study, but it would appear that our opposite-sex associations are stronger, although we cannot make a direct comparison between the studies as Wilkin et al. did not report their opposite-sex associations. Unlike Wilkin et al., we did not find gender interactions with parental obesity vs normal weight when using offspring BMI SDS as the outcome; the P-value for the interaction was 0.7 for maternal obesity (effect size=0.46 SDS for daughters and 0.43 SDS for sons), and 0.8 for paternal obesity (0.39 for sons and 0.37 for daughters). Hence, we found no evidence of large differences in mother–daughter and father–son obesity (in addition to previously reported BMI) concordance.

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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 2009; 33: 727–735.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Oral and Dental Science, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

    S Leary & A Ness

  2. Department of Social Medicine, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

    G Davey Smith

Authors
  1. S Leary
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  2. G Davey Smith
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  3. A Ness
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Correspondence to S Leary.

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Leary, S., Smith, G. & Ness, A. Reply to Wilkin. Int J Obes 35, 151–152 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/ijo.2010.172

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