Herle, M;
Pickles, A;
Micali, N;
Abdulkadir, M;
De Stavola, BL;
(2022)
Parental feeding and childhood genetic risk for obesity: exploring hypothetical interventions with causal inference methods.
International Journal of Obesity
10.1038/s41366-022-01106-2.
(In press).
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Abstract
Background: Parental-feeding behaviors are common intervention targets for childhood obesity, but often only deliver small changes. Childhood BMI is partly driven by genetic effects, and the extent to which parental-feeding interventions can mediate child genetic liability is not known. Here we aim to examine how potential interventions on parental-feeding behaviors can mitigate some of the association between child genetic liability and BMI in early adolescence, using causal inference methods. Methods: Data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children were used to estimate an interventional disparity measure for a child polygenic score for BMI (PGS-BMI) on BMI at 12 years. The approach compares counterfactual outcomes for different hypothetical interventions on parental-feeding styles applied when children are 10–11 years (n = 4248). Results are presented as adjusted total association (Adj-Ta) between genetic liability (PGS-BMI) and BMI at 12 years, versus the interventional disparity measure-direct effect (IDM-DE), which represents the association that would remain, had we intervened on parental-feeding under different scenarios. Results: For children in the top quintile of genetic liability, an intervention shifting parental feeding to the levels of children with lowest genetic risk, resulted in a difference of 0.81 kg/m2 in BMI at 12 years (Adj-Ta = 3.27, 95% CI: 3.04, 3.49; versus IDM-DE = 2.46, 95% CI: 2.24, 2.67). Conclusions: Findings suggest that parental-feeding interventions have the potential to buffer some of the genetic liability for childhood obesity. Further, we highlight a novel way to analyze potential interventions for health conditions only using secondary data analyses, by combining methodology from statistical genetics and social epidemiology.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Parental feeding and childhood genetic risk for obesity: exploring hypothetical interventions with causal inference methods |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1038/s41366-022-01106-2 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41366-022-01106-2 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > UCL GOS Institute of Child Health > Population, Policy and Practice Dept UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > UCL GOS Institute of Child Health UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10146015 |
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