Maternal eating disorders and infant temperament: findings from the Norwegian mother and child cohort study.

Objective: We hypothesized that women with eating disorders would be more likely to rate their infants' temperament higher on negative emotionality than women without eating disorders.

Methods: Of 3,013 mothers with eating disorders, 44 reported anorexia nervosa (AN), 436 bulimia nervosa (BN), 2,475 binge eating disorder (BED), and 58 EDNOS purging type (EDNOS-P). The referent group comprised 45,964 mothers with no eating disorder. A partial proportional odds model was used to estimate the relation among maternal eating disorder presentations and infant temperament ratings while adjusting for covariates.

Results: Women with AN, BN, EDNOS-P, and BED were 2.3, 1.4, 2.8, and 1.4 times more likely to report extreme fussiness than the referent group of women with no eating disorder, respectively.

Conclusions: Mothers with eating disorders may rate their infants as more difficult because of information-processing biases or because their infants are emotionally difficult. Maternal perception of infant temperament may be a risk factor for children's emotional development.