Morphometric and neurodevelopmental outcome at age five years of the offspring of women who continued to exercise regularly throughout pregnancy☆,☆☆,★,★★
Section snippets
Subject selection
A major design issue in studies of this type is to isolate the effect of the variable of interest (in this case exercise during pregnancy) from multiple other prenatal and postnatal confounders. The approach taken in this study was to obtain detailed data from a small number of offspring born of women without risk factors who were representative of those who continued to exercise throughout pregnancy and compare them to the offspring of individually matched control subjects born during the same
Maternal characteristics
By design, maternal characteristics in both groups were representative of the overall study populace3, 10 and were well matched for maternal characteristics known to affect size at birth and long-term outcome. The physical data dealing with age, height, weight, body fat, maximal aerobic capacity, pregnancy weight gain, change in weight at 5 years of age, and paternal weight and height are detailed in Table I. The only significant difference was that pregnancy weight gain was 21% less in the
DISCUSSION
These data negate the initial hypothesis. In terms of morphometric outcome, there is no evidence of growth restriction at age 5 years in the offspring of the exercising women. When compared with either national statistics33 or several other developmental cohorts,34, 35 both height and weight are at 50th percentile for age, and skinfold thicknesses and the subcutaneous fat area of the upper arm are between the 45th and 60th percentiles.18, 35, 36, 37, 38 Thus it is not that the offspring of the
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The intergenerational effects of parental physical activity on offspring brain and neurocognition in humans: A scoping review
2022, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral ReviewsCitation Excerpt :Pryor et al., interviewed mothers of offspring born small-for-gestational age and asked them to retrospectively recall whether they performed little or no exercise (45%), moderate levels of exercise (45%), or high levels of exercise (11%) during pregnancy (Pryor, 1996). Offspring sex was reported in all but three studies (Hellenes et al., 2015; Jukic et al., 2013; Labonte-Lemoyne et al., 2017) and was generally well-balanced (ranging from 40% (Clapp, 1996) to 54% (Ellingsen et al., 2020) male), except for one study which only included male offspring (Jochumsen et al., 2019). Offspring follow-up was during the neonatal stage (n = 2, 14%) (Clapp et al., 1999; Labonte-Lemoyne et al., 2017), infant stage (1–2 y) (n = 7, 50%) (Clapp et al., 1998; Domingues et al., 2014; Hellenes et al., 2015; Jukic et al., 2013; Nakahara et al., 2021a; Polanska et al., 2015), early childhood (4–7 y) (n = 3, 21%) (Clapp, 1996; Ellingsen et al., 2020; Menting et al., 2019), late childhood (8–10 y) (n = 2, 14%) (Esteban-Cornejo et al., 2016; Jukic et al., 2013), and young adulthood (17–21 y) (n = 1, 7%) (Jochumsen et al., 2019).
The placental role in developmental programming
2022, Reproductive and Developmental ToxicologyMaternal pregnancy diet, postnatal home environment and executive function and behavior in 3- To 4-y-olds
2021, American Journal of Clinical NutritionEarly neurodevelopment in the offspring of women enrolled in a randomized controlled trial assessing the effectiveness of a nutrition + exercise intervention on the cognitive development of 12-month-olds
2023, Journal of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease
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From the Departments of Reproductive Biology and of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Case Western Reserve University at MetroHealth Medical Center, Cleveland, Ohio
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Supported by grant HD21268 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the H. W. Chandler and G. F. Clapp Research Funds, and MetroHealth Medical Center.
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Reprint requests: James F. Clapp III, MD, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, MetroHealth Medical Center, 2500 MetroHealth Dr., Cleveland, OH 44109.
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0022-3476/96/$5.00 + 0 9/21/76242