Maintaining optimum weight seems to be crucial for more than just the obvious reasons. Especially, if this report from the Soerlandet Hospital and the University of Oslo is to be believed than both pre-pregnancy body mass and weight gain during pregnancy are indicators of infant birth weight.
For the analysis, a population based cohort study inspected almost 58,383 pregnant women from 2000 to 2007 as part of the Mother and Child Study. The team sought to examine the influence of pre-pregnancy body weight and weight gain during pregnancy on child birth weight.
Unni Mette Stamnes Koepp of the Department of Pediatrics at Soerlandet Hospital, cited, “Encouraging women to attain a healthy weight before conception and keep a moderate weight gain during pregnancy is important to avoid high or excessive birthweight in offspring. This is important knowledge for the battle against the world’s obesity epidemic.”
The outcomes showed that both body weight prior to pregnancy and weight gained during pregnancy were directly linked to birth weight of the infant. For each 1kg increase in pre-pregnancy BMI, the birth weight of the child apparently rose by 22.4g. A 10Kg weight gain during pregnancy accounted for nearly 224g increase in weight of the new born baby.
Surprisingly, education also surfaced out as a factor affecting the birth weight of children. Women with the highest medical qualification seemed to have kids with the highest birth weight. Those women who studied for around 17 years or more had kids with 79.2g excess weight than infants of women with 9 years of education.
Understanding influential variables are important to combat the global obesity epidemic, the scientists concluded.