Rutgers School of Public Health, Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, Piscataway, NJ, USA.
Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Department of Medicine, New Brunswick, NJ, USA.
Matern Child Health J. 2021 Feb;25(2):293-301. doi: 10.1007/s10995-020-03021-2. Epub 2020 Nov 13.
Maternal education has been shown repeatedly to be inversely associated with preterm birth. Both preterm birth and educational level of families are correlated across generations, but it is not clear if educational level of grandparents affects the risk of preterm delivery of their grandchildren, and, if so, if the association with grandmother's education is independent of mother's education.
We used New Jersey birth certificates to create a transgenerational dataset to examine the effect of grandmother's education on risk of PTB in White, Black and Hispanic grandchildren. We matched birth certificates of girls born in 1979-1983 to mothers listed on NJ birth certificates for the years 1999-2011. Thus, grandmothers were the women delivering in 1979-1983, and mothers were those born to the grandmothers who in turn delivered grandchildren in 1999-2011. We performed descriptive tabulations and multivariate logistic regression to develop risk estimates.
Overall, maternal education was associated inversely with PTB in each of the demographic groups. There was a substantial inter-generational increase in education between grandmothers and mothers in each group, which was most striking in Hispanics After adjusting for maternal age and education, grandmother's education continued to be associated with preterm birth of her grandchildren.
Grandmother's education was an additional, independent predictor of PTB in her grandchildren. This result supports the idea that mother's childhood and preconception socioeconomic environment, including the educational level of her childhood household affect her reproductive health.
已有研究反复表明，产妇受教育程度与早产呈负相关。早产和家庭受教育程度在代际间相关，但尚不清楚祖母的受教育程度是否会影响其孙辈早产的风险，如果是，那么祖母受教育程度与母亲受教育程度的关联是否独立。
我们使用新泽西州出生证明创建了一个跨代数据集，以检查祖母受教育程度对白种人、黑人和西班牙裔孙辈早产风险的影响。我们将 1979-1983 年出生的女孩的出生证明与 1999-2011 年登记的母亲的 NJ 出生证明相匹配。因此，祖母是在 1979-1983 年分娩的女性，而母亲是祖母的女儿，祖母的女儿又在 1999-2011 年生育了孙辈。我们进行了描述性制表和多变量逻辑回归以制定风险估计。
总体而言，在每个人群中，产妇受教育程度与早产呈负相关。在每个群体中，祖母和母亲之间的代际教育程度都有显著提高，在西班牙裔群体中最为明显。在调整了母亲的年龄和受教育程度后，祖母的受教育程度仍然与她孙辈的早产有关。
祖母的受教育程度是其孙辈早产的另一个独立预测因素。这一结果支持了这样一种观点，即母亲的童年和受孕前的社会经济环境，包括其童年家庭的教育水平，会影响其生殖健康。
