Infancy and childhood growth and physical activity in adolescence: prospective birth cohort study from Brazil
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RESEARCH
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Infancy and childhood growth and physical activity in adolescence: prospective birth cohort study from Brazil Pedro C Hallal1*, Samuel C Dumith1, Ulf Ekelund2, Felipe F Reichert1, Ana M B Menezes1, Cesar G Victora1 and Jonathan C K Wells3
Abstract Background: The Developmental Origins of Health and Disease hypothesis suggests that intrauterine, infancy and early childhood variables play a key role at programming later health. However, little is known on the programming of behavioral variables, because most studies so far focused on chronic disease-related and human capital outcomes. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effects of prenatal, infancy and childhood weight and length/height gains on objectively-measured physical activity (PA) in adolescence. Methods: This is a prospective birth cohort study in Pelotas, Brazil, including 457 adolescents (mean age: 13.3 years) with weight and length/height data at birth, one, three and six months, one and four years of age. PA was measured using a GT1M Actigraph accelerometer, and expressed as (a) minutes per day spent on sedentary, light, moderate, vigorous and very-vigorous activities; (b) total counts per day. Results: 61.3% of the adolescents accumulated 60+ minutes of moderate-to-vigorous PA per day. Weight and length/height trajectories in infancy and childhood were similar between those classified as active or inactive at 13.3 years. However, those classified as inactive were heavier and taller at all ages; differences were statistically significant only in terms of length at three, six and 12 months. Conclusions: Weight gain in infancy and childhood did not predict variability in adolescent PA, but those active in adolescence showed somewhat smaller average gains in length in infancy. These findings suggest that PA may partially be sensitive to early hormonal programming, or that genetic factors may affect both early growth and later metabolism or predisposition for PA. Keywords: Motor activity, Exercise, Epidemiology, Prospective studies, DOHaD
Introduction The Developmental Origins of Health and Disease [1] (DOHaD) hypothesis suggests that intrauterine, infancy and early childhood variables play a key role at programming later health. However, little is known on the programming of behavioral variables, because most studies so far focused on chronic disease-related (blood pressure, glucose, coronary heart disease) and human capital (schooling, height, income) outcomes [2-9]. Previous birth cohort studies from Brazil and UK examined early * Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Federal University of Pelotas, Rua Marechal Deodoro 1160, 96020-220 Pelotas, Brazil Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
life determinants of physical activity [10,11], and found that social variables were more strongly related to later physical activity than biological determinants. A recent meta-analysis from four studies in which objectivelymeasured data on physical activity were available observed no consistent effe
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