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Overweight toddlers may have lower childhood IQ
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WASHINGTON — Children who had overweight at age 1 to 2 years had lower IQ and other cognition scores at age 5 to 8 years compared with children who had normal weight as toddlers, according to study findings presented at ObesityWeek.
“Excess adiposity in the first 2 years of life is associated with subtle decreases in IQ, processing speed, and working memory scores in school-aged children,” presenter Nan Li, PhD, MBBS, a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University, told Endocrine Today.
“It is known that obesity is associated with lower cognition in adults. However, it will be surprising to the audience that obesity may start to play a detrimental role in cognitive abilities beginning in the first few years of life,” she said.
Li and colleagues analyzed data collected from 2003 to 2006 for the Health Outcomes and Measures of the Environment Study, a longitudinal study of pregnant women and their children through age 8 years. The study included 233 mother-child pairs.
Researchers categorized children at ages 1 or 2 years by weight-for-height standard deviation scores, a measure WHO recommends for assessing adiposity in young children: 167 children were within 1 SD from the mean and considered lean ( 1 SD), 48 were between 1 SD and 2 SD and considered “close to overweight” (>1 to 2SD), and 18 were more than 2 SD away and considered to have overweight or obesity.
Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scales of Intelligence-III and Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-IV were administered to the children at ages 5 and 8 years, respectively, to evaluate cognition. Associations between adiposity and cognition were assessed using linear mixed models, adjusting for mother’s age, education, BMI, breast-feeding duration, IQ and marital status and for child’s sex, race, age and birth weight.
Researchers determined that children considered close to overweight had lower full-scale IQ scores compared with lean children (beta = -4.4; 95% CI, -8.8 to -0.1) and slower processing speed (beta = -4.7; CI, -9.2 to -0.3) and lower working memory (beta = -8.2; CI, -13 to -3.2) scores.
Associations with obesity and IQ and component scores trended negatively, but were not statistically significant due to small sample size, Li said. — by Jill Rollet
Reference:
Li N. T-OR-LB-2089. Presented at: ObesityWeek 2017; Oct. 29-Nov. 2, 2017; Washington, D.C.
Disclosure: Li reports no relevant financial disclosures.