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Associations of offspring birthweight and placental weight with subsequent parental coronary heart disease: survival regression using the walker cohort

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 January 2024

Carlos Sánchez-Soriano Open the ORCID record for Carlos Sánchez-Soriano [Opens in a new window] ,
Ewan R. Pearson  and
Rebecca M. Reynolds Open the ORCID record for Rebecca M. Reynolds [Opens in a new window]
Carlos Sánchez-Soriano
Affiliation:
Centre for Cardiovascular Science, Queen’s Medical Research Institute, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
Ewan R. Pearson
Affiliation:
Division of Population Health and Genomics, Ninewells Hospital and School of Medicine, University of Dundee, Dundee, UK
Rebecca M. Reynolds*
Affiliation:
Centre for Cardiovascular Science, Queen’s Medical Research Institute, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
*
Corresponding author: R. M. Reynolds; Email: r.reynolds@ed.ac.uk
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Abstract

Low birth weight (BW) is consistently correlated with increased parental risk of subsequent cardiovascular disease, but the links with offspring placental weight (PW) are mostly unexplored. We have investigated the associations between parental coronary heart disease (CHD) and offspring BW and PW using the Walker cohort, a collection of 48,000 birth records from Dundee, Scotland, from the 1950s and 1960s. We linked the medical history of 13,866 mothers and 8,092 fathers to their offspring’s records and performed Cox survival analyses modelling maternal and paternal CHD risk by their offspring’s BW, PW, and the ratio between both measurements. We identified negative associations between offspring BW and both maternal (hazard ratio [HR]: 0.91, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.88–0.95) and paternal (HR: 0.96, 95% CI: 0.93–1.00) CHD risk, the stronger maternal correlation being consistent with previous reports. Offspring PW to BW ratio was positively associated with maternal CHD risk (HR: 1.14, 95% CI: 1.08–1.21), but the associations with paternal CHD were not significant. These analyses provide additional evidence for intergenerational associations between early growth and parental disease, identifying directionally opposed correlations of maternal CHD with offspring BW and PW, and highlight the importance of the placenta as a determinant of early development and adult disease.

Keywords

Birth weightplacental weightcoronary heart diseasesurvival analysisparental associations
Type
Original Article
Information
Journal of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease , Volume 14 , Issue 6 , December 2023 , pp. 746 - 754
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press in association with The International Society for Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD)

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