Childhood body mass index at 5.5 years mediates the effect of prenatal maternal stress on daughters’ age at menarche: Project Ice Storm
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Early pubertal timing is known to put women at greater risk for adverse physiological and psychological health outcomes. Of the factors that influence girls' pubertal timing, stress experienced during childhood has been found to advance age at menarche (AAM). However, it is not known if stress experienced by mothers during or in the months before conception can be similarly associated with earlier pubertal timing. Prenatal maternal stress (PNMS) is associated with metabolic changes, such as increased childhood adiposity and risk of obesity, that have been associated with earlier menarchal age. Using a prospective longitudinal design, the present study tested whether PNMS induced by a natural disaster is either directly associated with earlier AAM, or whether there is an indirect association mediated through increased girls' body mass index (BMI) during childhood. A total of 31 girls, whose mothers were exposed to the Quebec's January 1998 ice storm during pregnancy were followed from 6 months to 15.5 years of age. Mother's stress was measured within 6 months of the storm. BMI was measured at 5.5 years, and AAM was assessed through teen's self-report at 13.5 and 15.5 years of age. Results revealed that greater BMI at 5.5 years mediated the effect of PNMS on decreasing AAM [B=-0.059, 95% confidence intervals (-0.18, -0.0035)]. The present study is the first to demonstrate that maternal experience of stressful conditions during pregnancy reduces AAM in the offspring through its effects on childhood BMI. Future research should consider the impact of AAM on other measures of reproductive ability.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".