Main findings
This RCT follow-up study reports on anthropometry and PA of 7-year-old children whose mothers were randomised to moderate intensity exercise at least three times per week during pregnancy or standard antenatal care. As hypothesised, there were no group differences in BMI or PA of the children. Stratified analyses by sex, subgroup analyses including only children of women who adhered to the exercise protocol and sensitivity analyses excluding children born preterm, children admitted to the NICU and children with diseases or health problems at follow-up, gave essentially the same results. We found that children’s iso-BMI correlated with mothers’ BMI. Further, there was an association between the children's leisure time MVPA and intensity of PA with the mothers' daily PA and intensity of exercise.
Strengths and limitations
A strength of the RCT was the large number of participants and the computerised randomisation procedure used to allocate the women. This entails that misclassification is unlikely to have affected the results. The included women exercised regularly and had baseline BMI within the normal range, indicating they were active and healthy women. Their baseline characteristics were comparable to the large Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study [
25,
43], indicating a representative selection of Norwegian pregnant women. However, results should be interpreted with caution in pregnant populations with higher BMI, less physically active women and in ethnically diverse populations.
The present follow-up study was based on parent-report. Data was collected electronically using a software, which is a feasible, efficient and low-cost way of collecting data for larger groups of people, ensuring good data quality, and reducing the risk of data entry errors [
44]. However, respondents might interpret questions differently or answers could be exaggerated, misremembered, or affected by social desirability bias. We cannot exclude the possibility that this, or other factors such as community or culture, may have influenced the results. Nevertheless, it is unlikely to have affected the groups differently. We do not know whether the parents estimated or measured the child’s weight and height. On an individual level, a Belgium study reported less accuracy when parents estimated their child’s weight and height, and accordingly BMI, than when measurements were performed at home by the parents of children aged 3–7 years [
45]. However, on a group level there was no important differences between estimated and measured parent-reports [
45]. Moreover, the BMI of the children in our study were similar to parent-reported values in the large national MoBa study with a mean BMI in 7-year old girls (
n = 1839) and boys (
n = 1932) of 15.9 kg/m
2 (SD2.0 and 1.8, respectively) [
46]. The PA questions on frequency and duration have shown acceptable reliability and validity [
37], and all questions are in line with questions used in other Norwegian and international studies [
31,
34‐
36,
38]. The PAPQ is considered an acceptable method for assessing habitual physical activity and exercise among women at group level [
40]. In a priori power calculations we assumed that approximately 50% of the eligible children would attend the follow-up study. Thus, the low follow-up rate of 33%, limits our power to demonstrate differences and correlations, and non-significant findings should therefore be interpreted with caution. However, the mean values were highly similar between the groups and the non-significant correlations generally low, indicating that type II errors were less likely. Furthermore, the low follow-up rate may threaten the representativeness and limit the generalisability of results. A higher proportion of children in the intervention than in the control group attended the follow-up study, however, there were few baseline differences between participants and non-participants. Thus, we can assume that our results are representative for the sample initially included in this study.
Interpretation
Our study is one of few long-term follow-up studies of exercise during pregnancy. A small RCT of home-based stationary cycling or regular activity during pregnancy of 84 sedentary women reported no differences in height, weight, or BMI of the children at 1 or 7 years. However, children in the intervention group had increased body fat at 7 years, measured by dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry [
21]. In three different case-control studies of 65 [
18], 40 [
19], and 104 [
20] exercising women, children of women who continued to exercise in pregnancy weighed less and had less body fat than control children at birth [
18] and at 5 years of age [
19], suggesting that exercise during pregnancy reduced subcutaneous fat mass of the offspring. However, at 1 year, all anthropometric measurements were similar [
20]. Limitations with these studies include several potential confounders and highly selected and relatively small groups of healthy, exercising women. A large population-based study of 5125 Greek children reported that retrospectively recalled PA during pregnancy were significantly associated with obesity in the offspring at 8 years of age [
47]. However, this study included a large proportion of pre-pregnancy overweight and obese women, not necessarily representative for a healthy pregnant population. This may indicate that preconceptual health is more important than prenatal exercise or that other mechanisms of childhood obesity play a role. In the present RCT follow-up study, we found no evidence that children of mothers receiving regular exercise during pregnancy had a more unfavourable body composition than children of mothers receiving standard care. Consistent with our results, a meta-analysis of 135 studies (
n = 166,094 women) from 32 countries revealed no association between prenatal exercise and neonatal outcomes or body composition in terms of body fat percentage, body weight and BMI in childhood [
48]. Further, data from the large Danish National Birth Cohort Study, including 40,280 mother-child pairs, supports our findings that maternal exercise during pregnancy are not related to children’s BMI or risk of overweight [
49].
Not meeting the recommendation of 1 h daily MVPA [
6] is associated with an increased chance of overweight and obesity [
50]. Parents reported that 55.6–60.3% of the girls and 63.5–70.8% of the boys in the two groups, respectively, met this recommendation. These proportions seem lower than what has been found by use of accelerometer measurements of PA in Norwegian children, where 87% of girls and 94% of boys met the recommendation at 6 years of age, but the proportions fell to 64 and 81% at 9 years of age [
51]. In stratified analyses by sex, boys in the control group spent significantly more time on electronical devices than boys in the intervention group. This is probably a random finding. Even though longer screen viewing time in children has been associated with more sedentary behaviour, which might displace PA during early childhood [
52], we have no reason to believe that it affected the children’s PA in this study. We found that daily MVPA, frequency of leisure time MVPA, weekly leisure time MVPA and intensity of PA were similar in the two groups.
The present results also showed that most women in both groups performed daily PA and exercised regularly 7 years after the intervention period. When we performed subgroup analyses of women adhering to the exercise protocol, their weight and BMI were lower compared with the control group, consistent with other studies suggesting that an exercise intervention during pregnancy has a positive effect on mothers in the long term [
21,
53‐
55]. However, the subgroup analysis did not change the children’s results.
The associations between children’s and mothers’ BMI and PA both in the total material and in each group, suggest that mother’s adherence to a healthy lifestyle could influence her child’s health. These findings are supported by a British study, reporting a direct association between PA levels measured by accelerometery in 554 mothers and their 4-year-old children [
56]. Furthermore, a healthy lifestyle including regular exercise and a healthy BMI of the mother during their offspring’s childhood and adolescence has been associated with a substantially reduced risk of obesity in the children [
22].
Our results add to the existing knowledge on exercise during pregnancy. Both in previous [
10,
11] and the current follow-up study, we have shown that exercise during pregnancy does not adversely affect childhood outcomes. As pregnancy may be a time when the level of PA declines [
43,
57], interventions for encouraging pregnant women to be physically active seem beneficial, given the adverse health effects of inactivity, overweight and excessive gestational weight gain [
16,
43,
58‐
60]. Thus, promoting a healthy lifestyle, both before, during and after pregnancy, may prevent chronic disease risk in more than one generation.