Intergenerational Associations Between Maternal Diet and Childhood Adiposity: A Bayesian Regularized Mediation Analysis

Yu-Bo Wang, Cuilin Zhang and Zhen Chen ()
Additional contact information
Yu-Bo Wang: Clemson University
Cuilin Zhang: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health
Zhen Chen: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health

Statistics in Biosciences, 2021, vol. 13, issue 3, No 8, 524-542

Abstract: Abstract Growing evidence supports a positive association between childhood obesity and chronic diseases in later life. It is also suggested that childhood obesity is more prevalent for children born from pregnancies complicated by metabolic disorders such as gestational diabetes, and can be related to maternal dietary factors during gestation. Extending conventional analyses that report only the marginal associations within non-causal mediation frameworks, we present mediation analysis in the case of multiple exposures and multiple mediators using a regularized two-stage approach. By placing shrinkage priors on each parameter relating to direct and indirect effects, a parsimonious model can be obtained, and consequently, the most relevant pathways will be selected to inform the development of efficient prevention programs. We apply this method to data from the Danish site of the Diabetes & Women’s Health Study, Danish National Birth Cohort (DNBC), and find 6 significant maternal risk factors either directly or indirectly affecting childhood body mass index z score at age 7. Simulations with data-generating mechanisms similar to the DNBC data demonstrate good performance of the proposed model.

Keywords: Childhood adiposity; Mediation analysis; Potential outcome; Regularization; Lasso (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12561-021-09305-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:stabio:v:13:y:2021:i:3:d:10.1007_s12561-021-09305-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/12561

DOI: 10.1007/s12561-021-09305-7

Access Statistics for this article

Statistics in Biosciences is currently edited by Hongyu Zhao and Xihong Lin

More articles in Statistics in Biosciences from Springer, International Chinese Statistical Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().