Figure 1.

The direct and indirect effects of grandmaternal birth weight on grandchild birth weight. The figure shows the results of the mediation analyses, performed with the bootstrapping method with 5000 resamples, where maternal birth weight was examined as a mediator of the associations between grandmaternal birth weight and the birth weight of the grandchild. As estimates of the strength of the associations, we provide unstandardized regression coefficients (B) in standard deviation (SD) units, their 95 % confidence intervals (CI) and standard errors (se) and p-values of direct and indirect effects from the mediation analyses. All continuous variables are expressed in SD units. The predictive power of the whole regression analysis model where both grandmaternal and maternal birth weight are used as predictors of child birth weight is specified with the following estimates: F (2, 1454) =64.0, R²=8.1%, p<0.001.