Normal weight gain best for most pregnant teens
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Gaining a lot of weight during pregnancy does not help teens have heavier babies, and may also have the unwanted side effect of increasing a mother’s risk of being overweight or obese in the future, research suggests.
Pregnant African American women and adolescents are more likely to have low birth weight babies, and they are often counseled to strive for weight gains at the upper recommended limit in order to ensure that their infants are born at healthier weights.
But there is growing evidence that this advice may do nothing to improve infant health while putting a mother’s health at risk.
To investigate how weight gain during pregnancy would affect birth weight, Dr. Kimberly O. O’Brien of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York and colleagues looked at the medical records of 815 pregnant African American teens, 711 of whom delivered at term.
Fifty-eight percent of all term deliveries and 74 percent of the overweight adolescents had pregnancy weight gains within the upper half of or above the recommended ranges for their body mass index.
There was no difference in birth weight between infants of women who gained these larger amounts of weight and those who gained less, the researchers report in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
“Looking at this population, we did find that higher weight gains in these teens were not being translated to a higher infant birth weight,” O’Brien told Reuters Health.
“African American adolescents entering pregnancy underweight or at average weight should be counseled to gain within the recommended ranges, whereas overweight adolescents need support to avoid excessive gestational weight gain,” she and colleagues conclude.
“It’s very important that teens gain within the lower half of the recommended range,” O’Brien said, adding that doctors caring for pregnant teens should monitor their weight more closely to ensure they don’t gain too much.
“For anyone, gaining more weight than you need to during pregnancy makes it all the more harder to lose that weight once the infant is born,” O’Brien added.
SOURCE: American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2006.
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