Nutritional assessment of newborns regarding preconceptional maternal body mass index

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Obesity and overweight in pregnancy have a significant impact in fetal development. However, this association remains controversial. OBJECTIVE: assess the association between maternal preconception body mass index (BMI) and the newborn nutritional status. MATERIAL AND METHODS: Prospective study, where singleton births were included. Newborns were classified according to their mother’s preconception BMI and anthropometric measurements were taken to evaluate the newborn’s nutritional status. For the statistical análisis we present descriptive statistics for the main variables and we fitted lineal regression models. RESULTS: A total of 492 dyads were included, 30.7% of the mothers had overweight or obesity. We found that mothers with overweight or obesity tend to have products with higher birth weight (?=0.01; IC95% (0.002,0.019) p0.015), increased arm circumference (?=0.02; IC95% (0.001,0.045) p0.037) and a tendency of lower length at birth (?=0.002; IC95% (-0.003,0.0002) p0.19) CONCLUSIONS: There are significant changes in the newborns anthropometric measures of mothers with higher BMI; therefore there could be an association between maternal preconception overweight and obesity with abnormal intrauterine growth.