Objectives: Previous studies indicated a significant association between small for gestational age (SGA) in infants and their parents' socioeconomic status (SES). Thus, this study aimed to examine if parental factors, such as maternal smoking, and the pre-pregnancy body mass index (BMI) could mediate the associations between parental SES and SGA.
Methods: The participants of this study were pregnant women who enrolled in an ongoing birth cohort study, the Hokkaido study, during the first trimester of their pregnancies. A total of 14,593 live singleton births were included in the statistical analysis, of which 1011 (6.9%) were SGA. Two structural equation models were employed to evaluate the associations between parental SES, parental characteristics, and SGA.
Results: The effect of low SES on SGA was directly mediated by maternal pre-pregnancy BMI, smoking during the third trimester, and alcohol consumption during the first trimester in the first model, which was based the assumption of independent associations between mediating factors. In the second model, which additionally considered the mediating factors from the first model, smoking during pregnancy mediated decline in parental SES, consequently increased SGA. Moreover, an increase in pregnancy smoking status increased the prevalence of lower maternal pre-pregnancy BMI and its effect on SGA.
Conclusions for practice: In this study, we observed the independent mediating effect of maternal pre-pregnancy BMI, smoking, and alcohol consumption during pregnancy on low SES and, consequently, SGA, with the additional mediating pathway of SES to smoking to low BMI on SGA.
Keywords: Birth cohort study; Parental tobacco smoking; Small for gestational age; Socioeconomic status; Structure equation modeling.