Traffic-related air pollution and childhood obesity in an Italian birth cohort

Highlights: • Few studies analyse the association between air pollution and children BMI. • We modelled traffic-related air pollution with land-use regression models. • Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) has been used to control for selection bias. • No association was found between pollutants and ponderal excess parameters. Air pollution is associated with several adverse health outcomes in children, such as respiratory illnesses and cognitive development impairment. There are suggestions of an effect of traffic-related air pollution on the occurrence of childhood obesity, but the results are not consistent.