Maternal eating disorders and offspring sex ratios at birth

Abstract

Sir, We thank Dr. James for his commentary on our work. We are able to partially address one of his questions using data from the MoBa cohort. In a related report (1), including 41,000 mothers from the MoBa cohort, only 2.5% of the mothers reported that they had been treated with hormones in connection with their pregnancy. Among the 37 women with anorexia nervosa (AN) in that sample, only one reported hormonal treatment. We repeated these analyses on our current AN sample and again found only one participant who reported hormonal treatment. Other indices of hormonal status are not available to further address his question. Most importantly, our reported observation was purposefully presented as a hypothesis-generating result as highlighted in our abstract ‘If confirmed, this finding could provide evidence in formulating hypotheses regarding the consequences of eating disorders and determinants of sex ratio at birth’. We appreciate Dr. James’ further hypothesizing regarding our data.