Background

Lifetime educational attainment is an important predictor of health and well-being for women in the United States. In this study, we examine the roles of sociocultural factors in youth and an understudied biological life event, pubertal timing, in predicting women's lifetime educational attainment.

Methods

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 cohort (N = 3889), we conducted sequential multivariate linear regression analyses to investigate the influences of macro-level and family-level sociocultural contextual factors in youth (region of country, urbanicity, race/ethnicity, year of birth, household composition, mother's education, and mother's age at first birth) and early menarche, a marker of early pubertal development, on women's educational attainment after age 24.

Results

Pubertal timing and all sociocultural factors in youth, other than year of birth, predicted women's lifetime educational attainment in bivariate models. Family factors had the strongest associations. When family factors were added to multivariate models, geographic region in youth, and pubertal timing were no longer significant.

Conclusion

Our findings provide additional evidence that family factors should be considered when developing comprehensive and inclusive interventions in childhood and adolescence to promote lifetime educational attainment among girls.

Background

Education is an important social determinant of many health outcomes, but the relationship between educational attainment and the amount of weight gained over the course of a woman's pregnancy (gestational weight gain [GWG]) has not been established clearly.

Methods

We used data from 1979 through 2010 for women in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979) cohort (n = 6,344 pregnancies from 2,769 women). We used generalized estimating equations to estimate the association between educational attainment and GWG adequacy (as defined by 2009 Institute of Medicine guidelines), controlling for diverse social factors from across the life course (e.g., income, wealth, educational aspirations and expectations) and considering effect measure modification by race/ethnicity and prepregnancy overweight status.

Results

In most cases, women with more education had increased odds of gaining a recommended amount of gestational weight, independent of educational aspirations and educational expectations and relatively robust to sensitivity analyses. This trend manifested itself in a few different ways. Those with less education had higher odds of inadequate GWG than those with more education. Among those who were not overweight before pregnancy, those with less education had higher odds of excessive GWG than college graduates. Among women who were White, those with less than a high school degree had higher odds of excessive GWG than those with more education.

Conclusion

The relationship between educational attainment and GWG is nuanced and nonlinear.

Objectives The current study examined how prepregnancy body mass index (BMI), gestational weight gain, and birth weight cluster between births within women and between women who are sisters. Methods Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort, we utilized nested, multivariable hierarchical linear models to examine the correlation of these three outcomes between births (n = 6006) to women (n = 3605) and sisters (n = 3170) so that we can quantify the clustering by sibship and by woman for these three pregnancy-related outcomes. Results After controlling for confounding covariates, prepregnancy BMI (intraclass correlation (ICC) 0.24, 95% CI 0.16, 0.32), gestational weight gain (ICC 0.23, 95% CI 0.16, 0.31), and infant's birthweight (ICC 0.07, 95% CI 0.003, 0.13) were correlated between sisters. Additionally, all three outcomes were significantly correlated between births for each sister, suggesting that prepregnancy BMI (ICC 0.82, 95% CI 0.81, 0.83), gestational weight gain (ICC 0.45, 95% CI 0.42, 0.49), and birth weight (ICC 0.31, 95% CI 0.28, 0.35) track between pregnancies in the same woman. Conclusions for Practice The observed clustering both within women and between sisters suggests that shared genetic and environmental factors among sisters play a role in pregnancy outcomes above and beyond that of women's own genetic and environmental factors. Findings suggest that asking a woman about her sisters' pregnancy outcomes could provide insight into the possible outcomes for her current pregnancy. Future research should test if collecting such a family history and providing tailored clinical recommendations accordingly would be useful.