Wang, SiwenAguilar Lacasaña, SofíaBustamante Pineda, MarionaVrijheid, MartineHivert, Marie-France2025-02-122025-02-122024Wang S, Casey E, Sordillo J, Aguilar-Lacasaña S, Morales Berstein F, Biedrzycki RJ, et al. Cesarean delivery and blood DNA methylation at birth and childhood: Meta-analysis in the Pregnancy and Childhood Epigenetics Consortium. Sci Adv. 2024 Nov 29;10(48):eadr2084. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adr20842375-2548http://hdl.handle.net/10230/69588Children born via cesarean delivery have a higher risk of metabolic, immunological, and neurodevelopmental disorders compared to those born via vaginal delivery, although mechanisms remain unclear. We conducted a meta-analysis of epigenome-wide association studies to examine the associations between delivery mode and blood DNA methylation at birth and its persistence in early childhood. Participants were from 19 pregnancy cohorts (9833 term newborns) and 6 pediatric cohorts (2429 children aged 6 to 10 years). We identified six CpGs in cord blood associated with cesarean delivery (effect size range: 0.4 to 0.7%, P < 1.0 × 10-7): MAP2K2 (cg19423175), LIM2 (cg01500140), CNP (cg13917614), BLM (cg18247172), RASA3 (cg22348356), and RUNX3 (cg20674490), independent of cell proportions and other confounders. In childhood, none of these CpGs were associated with cesarean delivery, and no additional CpGs were identified. Delivery mode was associated with cell proportions at birth but not in childhood. Further research is needed to elucidate cesarean delivery's molecular influence on offspring health.application/pdfeng© 2024 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, so long as the resultant use is not for commercial advantage and provided the original work is properly cited.Cesària (Operació)info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adr2084info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess