Maternal weight at the start of pregnancy is more strongly related to the risk of pregnancy complications than weight gain during pregnancy. The conclusion is of a study, led by an international consortium of researchers, in which the Instituto de Saúde Pública da Universidade do Porto (ISPUP) participated.
The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), analyzed more than 190,000 women from 16 countries, including Portugal.
Complications such as diabetes and gestational hypertension, premature births, cesarean sections, pre-eclampsia (high blood pressure and swelling of the legs) or low birth weight were found in more than 60% of the women who started pregnancy with severe obesity. These same problems affect 34% of women who had a normal weight before pregnancy.
The results show that although weight gain during pregnancy has an impact, its contribution to the risk of complications is lower when compared to maternal weight before the onset of pregnancy.
According to Ana Cristina Santos, one of the ISPUP researchers involved in the study, “prevention has to be done in the pre-conception period. This investment in prevention is important as we have seen an increase in the prevalence of obesity across the population, even in women of childbearing age”.
The initial goal of the study was to redefine the ideal weight gain intervals during pregnancy. The study allowed “to create new standards of what would be great weight gain during pregnancy, taking into account Body Mass Index (BMI) before gestation“, adds the researcher.
The work used data from women who were pregnant between 1989 and 2015. From Portugal, data were used of 7220 women who are part of the Generation XXI cohort – a longitudinal study that follows, since 2005, 8600 participants who were born in the public maternity hospitals of the Metropolitan Area of Porto.
The research, led by the Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, involved more than 60 international researchers working together in the EU-funded Horizon 2020 LifeCycle Project – Maternal Obesity and Childhood Outcomes Group.
The article is entitled Association of Gestational Weight Gain with Maternal Adverse and Infant Outcomes.
Image: Pixabay/Fotorech
