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WASHINGTON, Sept. 6 (Xinhua) -- Children born by cesarean delivery might be at a higher risk of becoming obese, especially within families when compared to their siblings born via vaginal birth, a U.S. study said Tuesday.
"Cesarean deliveries are without a doubt a necessary and lifesaving procedure in many cases," senior author Jorge Chavarro, associate professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard University, said in a statement.
"But cesareans also have some known risks to the mother and the newborn. Our findings show that risk of obesity in the offspring could be another factor to consider."
The new analysis, published in the U.S. journal JAMA Pediatrics, included 16 years' worth of data from more than 22,000 young adults in the Growing Up Today Study, in which participants answered survey questions every year or two years from 1996 to 2012.
Compared with vaginal birth, cesarean delivery was associated with a 15 percent increase in the risk of obesity in children after adjusting for mitigating factors, according to the results.
Within families, children born by cesarean were 64 percent more likely to be obese than their siblings born by vaginal delivery.
The study also showed that children born by vaginal birth to women who had had a previous cesarean delivery were 31 percent less likely to be obese compared with those children born to women with repeated cesarean deliveries.
"I think that our findings -- particularly those that show a dramatic difference in obesity risk between those born via cesarean and their siblings born through vaginal delivery -- provide very compelling evidence that the association between cesarean birth and childhood obesity is real," said Chavarro.
"That's because, in the case of siblings, many of the factors that could potentially be playing a role in obesity risk, including genetics, would be largely the same for each sibling -- except for the type of delivery."
Nearly 1.3 million cesareans are performed each year in the U.S., accounting for one third of all deliveries.
While a number of previous studies have suggested a link between cesarean delivery and a higher risk of obesity in offspring, the studies were either too small to detect a clear association or lacked detailed data.
