Early Life Weight Gain and Development of Childhood Asthma in a Prospective Birth Cohort

Rationale: The prevalence of childhood asthma has been rising worldwide in parallel with childhood obesity. Objectives: We investigated whether there is a temporal relationship between early-life weight gain (reflecting growth velocity) and early-life BMI attained status (reflecting accumulative weight) with future risk of asthma in the Boston Birth Cohort (BBC). Methods: This report includes 1,928 children from the BBC with a mean age of 7.8 (SD:3.3) years, enrolled at birth and followed prospectively. Asthma was defined using physician diagnosis code (ICD-9-CM code=493.xx) in children two years and older. We categorized the children by their weight gain trajectory based on changes in z-scores: slow ( 1.28); and by their BMI attained status (underweight, normal weight and overweight) during the first 4, 12 and 24 months. Poisson regression models with robust variance estimation were applied to examine the relationship between early-l...