COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado — The adult children of mothers who had prepregnancy obesity have a significantly increased risk for psychosis, new research shows.
“This is now the fourth large study to show a positive association between maternal prepregnancy obesity and psychosis outcomes,” said lead author James Scott, MD, of the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. “It appears that prepregnancy obesity may be casting a long shadow into lives of offspring,” he added.
The findings were presented here at the 15th International Congress on Schizophrenia Research (ICOSR).
Adjusted for Important Confounders
Although previous studies have linked maternal obesity with the risk for psychosis in offspring, few large studies have adjusted for a variety of potentially important confounders, including birth complications, he said.
For the study, Dr Scott and his colleagues evaluated data from the large, population-based Mater University Study of Pregnancy, looking at factors that included maternal body mass index (BMI), which was reported at the first confinement visit.
Data on a cohort of 2303 offspring of the mothers with a mean age of 19.9 years (range, 18 to 23 years) were assessed with regard to psychosis-related outcomes. The offspring included 48.5% males.
After adjusting for the variables, including maternal age, education, and income, as well as child sex, age, and birth complications, the results showed a significant association between being overweight or obese prior to pregnancy and offspring reporting any delusion at age 21 years (adjusted odds ratio [aOR], 1.54; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.09 - 2.17; P = .02).
The association between the highest quartile of the Peters Delusional Inventory (PDI) compared with the lowest quartile PDI was also significant (aOR, 1.40; 95% CI, 1.00 - 1.97), and there was a trend for offspring reporting any hallucination (aOR, 1.42; 95% CI, 0.98 - 2.07).
Dr Scott noted that an important limitation of the study was the relatively low rates of obesity in the mothers, which was only approximately 15%.
“In order to evaluate the data on the adult offspring, we had to look back to birth data on the mothers from the 1980s, and we know that obesity rates have increased since then,” he said.
Atypical Neurodevelopment
The findings nevertheless underscore more troubling effects of obesity that can cross generations, he said.
“We know that the consequences of prepregnancy obesity on adult offspring include the risk of a wide range of metabolic disorders, including obesity, hypertension, and insulin resistance and diabetes, and we now see that it also increases the risk of atypical neurodevelopment,” Dr Scott said.