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Background: The Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) hypothesis postulates that exposures during early life, such as maternal dietary intake during pregnancy, may have a lifelong impact on the individual's susceptibility to diseases. The individual's own lifestyle habits are obviously an additional factor, but we have only limited knowledge regarding how it may interact with prenatal exposures in determining later disease. To gain further insight into these potentially complex relationships, we examined the longitudinal association between maternal diet quality during pregnancy and diet quality in early adolescence in a contemporary cohort.Methods and Findings: From 1996 to 2003, the Danish National Birth Cohort (DNBC) was established. Women from across the country were enrolled, and dietary intake in midpregnancy was assessed concurrently with a 360-item food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) (https://www.dnbc.dk/-/media/arkiv/projekt-sites/dnbc/kodeboeger/dnbc-food-frequency-questionnaire/dnbc-food-frequency-questionnaire-pdf.pdf?la=en). During 2013-2018, dietary intake was assessed at age 14 years with a 150-item FFQ (https://www.dnbc.dk/-/media/arkiv/projekt-sites/dnbc/kodeboeger/ffq-14/dnbc-ffq-14-english-translation.pdf?la=en) in the DNBC children. Among the 19,582 mother-offspring pairs included in the analyses, the mean age (±standard deviation [SD]) was 30.7 (±4.1) years and 14.0 (±0.0) years for mothers and offspring, respectively. The majority of both mothers (67%) and offspring (76%) were classified as normal weight. For both questionnaires, a Healthy Eating Index (HEI) was developed as an indicator for diet quality based on current Danish Food-Based Dietary Guidelines (FBDG) including eight components: fruits and vegetables, fish, dietary fibres, red meat, saturated fatty acids (SFAs), sodium, sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs), and added sugar. The HEI score was divided into quartiles; individuals in the highest quartile represented those with the most optimal diet. The maternal HEI score was correlated positively with offspring HEI score (Pearson r = 0.22, p < 0.001). A log-linear binomial model was used to estimate the relative risk of the offspring being in the highest quartile of HEI at age 14 years if the mother was ranked in quartile 4 during pregnancy. Results showed that offspring born to mothers who were in the highest HEI quartile during pregnancy were more likely themselves to be located in the highest HEI quartile at age 14 years (risk ratio [RR]: 2.1, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 2.0, 2.3, p < 0.001). Adjusting for maternal prepregnancy body mass index (BMI), parity, education, alcohol intake, physical activity, smoking, and breastfeeding, as well as offspring total energy intake and sex, did not influence the effect estimates. The limitations of our study include that some attrition bias towards more healthy participants was observed when comparing participants with nonparticipants. Bias in the FFQ method may also have resulted in underrepresentation of adolescents with poorer diet quality.Conclusions: In this study using data from a large national birth cohort, we observed that maternal diet quality during pregnancy was associated with diet quality of the offspring at age 14 years. These findings indicate the importance of separating early dietary exposures from later dietary exposures when studying dietary aetiologies of diseases postulated to have developmental origins such as, for instance, obesity or asthma in observational settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To assess risk factors of otitis media (OM) in six-months-old children. Method: The sample consisted of 69,105 mothers and their children from the Danish National Birth Cohort. The women were interviewed twice during pregnancy and again 6 months after birth. The outcome “one or more” maternal reported episodes of OM at age six months. In total 37 factors were assessed, covering prenatal, maternal, perinatal and postnatal factors. Results: At age six months 5.3% (95% CI 5.1–5.5) of the children had experienced one or more episodes of OM. From the regression analysis, 11 variables were associated with a risk of OM. When a Bonferroni correction was introduced, gender, prematurity, parity, maternal age, maternal self-estimated health, taking penicillin during pregnancy, and terminating breastfeeding before age six months, was associated with a risk of early OM. The adjusted ORs of OM for boys versus girls was 1.30 (95% CI 1.18–1.44). The OR having one sibling versus no siblings was 3.0 (95% CI 2.64–3.41). If the woman had been taking penicillin during pregnancy, the OR was 1.35 (95% CI 1.15–1.58). Children born before 38th gestational week had an increased OR for early OM of 1.49 (95% CI 1.21–1.82). Children of young women had an increased OR of early OM compared to children of older women. Additionally, children of women who rated their own health low compared to those rating their health as high, had an increased OR of 1.38 (95% CI 1.10–1.74). Finally, children being breastfeed less than 6 months, had an increased OR of 1.42 (95% CI 1.28–1.58) compared to children being breastfeed beyond 6 months. Conclusion: These findings indicate that prenatal factors are of less importance regarding early OM before the age of six months. Postnatal risk factors seem to pose the main risk of early OM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background/Objectives: Vitamin D deficiency is common among pregnant women and since the fetus relies exclusively on maternal supply, deficiency could potentially interfere with fetal development. Vitamin D blood concentrations during pregnancy have been associated with offspring cardio-metabolic health in a few previous studies but the evidence is still inconsistent and only one previous study has followed the offspring into adulthood. The aim of the present study was to investigate the association between maternal serum concentration of vitamin D (25(OH)D) in week 30 of gestation and offspring cardio-metabolic risk factors at 20 years. Subjects/Methods: A follow up study of a Danish birth cohort from 1988–89 (n = 965) was conducted. A blood sample was drawn from the women in week 30 of gestation. In 2008–2009, 95% of the original mother and child dyads could be identified in the central registration registry and were alive and living in Denmark. The offspring were followed up with self-reported anthropometrics (N = 629, 69%) and a clinical examination (N = 410, 45%). Multiple linear regression was used to estimate the association between maternal 25(OH)D and offspring cardio-metabolic risk factors adjusting for potential confounders. Results: No overall association was observed between maternal 25(OH)D in week 30 of gestation and offspring cardio-metabolic risk factors. However, the analyses did suggest a possible inverse association with blood pressure in females. Conclusions: No clear association between maternal 25(OH)D concentration in week 30 of gestation and cardio-metabolic risk factors in the 20 year old offspring was found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Studies investigating the association between maternal vitamin D status and offspring bone mass measured by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) during childhood have shown conflicting results. Purpose: We used occurrence of bone fractures up to the age of 18 as a measure reflecting offspring bone mass and related that to maternal vitamin D status. Methods: The Danish Fetal Origins 1988 Cohort recruited 965 pregnant women during 1988–89 at their 30th gestation week antenatal midwife visit. A blood sample was drawn and serum was stored, which later was analyzed for the concentration of 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D) by the liquid chromatography coupled with a tandem mass spectrometric method (LC-MS/MS). Outcome was diagnosis of first time bone fractures extracted from the Danish National Patient Register. Results: Vitamin D status was available for 850 women. The median (5th–95th percentile) 25(OH)D was 76.2 (23.0–152.1) nmol/l. During follow up 294 children were registered with at least one bone fracture diagnosis. Multivariable Cox regression models using age as the underlying time scale indicated no overall association between maternal vitamin D status and first time bone fractures. However, there was a significantly increased hazard ratio (HR) during childhood for those who had maternal blood drawn in Dec/Jan/Feb compared with Jun/Jul/Aug (HR: 1.75, 95%CI: 1.11–2.74). Adjustment for vitamin D status strengthened this association (1.82, 1.12–2.97), which indicated a potential seasonal impact on offspring fractures independent of maternal vitamin D status. In a sensitivity analysis we found a borderline significant inverse association between continuous concentrations of 25(OH)D and offspring forearm fractures (P = 0.054). Conclusion: Overall, our results did not substantiate an association between maternal vitamin D status and offspring bone fractures. Further studies on this subject are needed, but the study populations must be large enough to allow for subdivision of fractures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Dietary patterns better reflect eating habits as opposed to single dietary components. However, the use of dietary pattern analysis in nutritional epidemiology has been hampered by the complexity of interpreting and presenting multidimensional dietary data. Methods: This study extracts and visualizes dietary patterns from self-reported dietary data collected in mid-pregnancy (25th week of gestation) from nearly 60,000 mother-child pairs part of a prospective, longitudinal cohort (Danish National Birth Cohort) and further examines their associations with spontaneous and induced preterm birth (gestational age<259 days (<37 weeks)). Results: A total of seven dietary patterns were extracted by principal component analysis, characterized and visualized by color-coded spider plots, and referred to as: Vegetables/Prudent, Alcohol, Western, Nordic, Seafood, Candy and Rice/Pasta/Poultry. A consistent dose-response association with preterm birth was only observed for Western diet with an odds ratio of 1.30 (95% CI: 1.13, 1.49) comparing the highest to the lowest quintile. This association was primarily driven by induced preterm deliveries (odds ratio = 1.66, 95% CI: 1.30, 2.11, comparing the highest to the lowest quintile) while the corresponding odds ratio for spontaneous preterm deliveries was more modest (odds ratio = 1.18, 95% CI: 0.99, 1.39). All based on adjusted analyses. Conclusions: In conclusion, this study presented a simple and novel framework for visualizing correlation structures between overall consumption of foods group and their relation to nutrient intake and maternal characteristics. Our results suggest that Western-type diet, high in meat and fats and low in fruits and vegetables, is associated with increased odds of induced preterm birth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]