Associations between Longitudinal Gestational Weight Gain and Scalar Infant Birth Weight: A Bayesian Joint Modeling Approach

Despite the importance of maternal gestational weight gain, it is not yet conclusively understood how weight gain during different stages of pregnancy influences health outcomes for either mother or child. We partially attribute this to differences in and the validity of statistical methods for the analysis of longitudinal and scalar outcome data. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian joint regression model that estimates and uses trajectory parameters as predictors of a scalar response. Our model remedies notable issues with traditional linear regression approaches found in the clinical literature. In particular, our methodology accommodates nonprospective designs by correcting for bias in self-reported prestudy measures; truly accommodates sparse longitudinal observations and short-term variation without data aggregation or precomputation; and is more robust to the choice of model changepoints. We demonstrate these advantages through a real-world application to the Alberta Pregnancy Outcomes and Nutrition (APrON) dataset and a comparison to a linear regression approach from the clinical literature. Our methods extend naturally to other maternal and infant outcomes as well as to areas of research that employ similarly structured data.