Research Article Maternal and Early Childhood Risk Factors for Overweight and Obesity among Low-Income Predominantly Black Children at Age Five Years: A Prospective Cohort Study

Copyright © 2012 Naveed Zafar Janjua et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Objective. To identify maternal and early childhood risk factors for obesity and overweight among children at age 5 in the state of Alabama. Methods. We recruited 740 mothers during early pregnancy from University of Alabama Prenatal Clinics in a prospective cohort study and followed them throughout pregnancy. We followed their children from birth until 5 years of age. The main outcome measure was obesity (BMI for age and sex ≥ 95th percentile) at 5 years of age. We used poisson regression with robust variance estimation to compute risk ratio (RR). Results. At the 5th year of followup, 71 (9.6%) of the children were obese and 85 (11.5%) were overweight (BMI ≥ 85th–<95th percentile). In multivariable analysis, maternal prepregnancy overweight (RR: 2.30