BackgroundHigher parity has been implicated as a risk factor for obesity of women. The objective of the study was to examine whether parity was associated with general obesity or abdominal obesity, or both, among middle-aged and older Chinese women.MethodsA total of 12,829 Chinese women (mean age: 64.8 years) with at least one live birth were selected from the Dongfeng–Tongji Cohort Study (phase II). We used body mass index to assess general obesity, and waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), waist-to-height ratio (WHtR) and waist circumference (WC) to assess abdominal obesity. We used multivariate linear and logistic regression models to investigate the association between parity and obesity.ResultsThe values of all four obesity measures increased with the greater number of live births (P for trend <0.001). After adjustment for potential confounders, women with four or more children had 1.72 times (95 % confidence interval [CI], 1.41–2.10) higher risk of general obesity, and 1.93 (95 % CI, 1.57–2.37), 2.09 (95 % CI, 1.65–3.64) and 1.58 (95 % CI, 1.28–1.94) times risk of abdominal obesity assessed by WHR, WHtR and WC, respectively. Furthermore, we observed an ascending gradient between parity and the three abdominal obesity measures.ConclusionsParity was positively associated with risk of obesity, especially abdominal obesity, in the long term among Chinese women.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12986-016-0133-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
COVID-19 has caused numerous infections with diverse clinical symptoms. To identify human genetic variants contributing to the clinical development of COVID-19, we genotyped 1457 (598/859 with severe/mild symptoms) and sequenced 1141 (severe/mild: 474/667) patients of Chinese ancestry. We further incorporated 1401 genotyped and 948 sequenced ancestry-matched population controls, and tested genome-wide association on 1072 severe cases versus 3875 mild or population controls, followed by trans-ethnic meta-analysis with summary statistics of 3199 hospitalized cases and 897,488 population controls from the COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative. We identified three significant signals outside the well-established 3p21.31 locus: an intronic variant in FOXP4-AS1 (rs1853837, odds ratio OR = 1.28, P = 2.51 × 10−10, allele frequencies in Chinese/European AF = 0.345/0.105), a frameshift insertion in ABO (rs8176719, OR = 1.19, P = 8.98 × 10−9, AF = 0.422/0.395) and a Chinese-specific intronic variant in MEF2B (rs74490654, OR = 8.73, P = 1.22 × 10−8, AF = 0.004/0). These findings highlight an important role of the adaptive immunity and the ABO blood-group system in protection from developing severe COVID-19.
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