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Washington DC: Lifestyle changes have many benefits, even for overweight pregnant women. A new study has found that it can reduce complications during pregnancy if they alter their diet and lifestyle before the start of their pregnancy.
Many overweight and obese women gain too much weight during pregnancy, further increasing their already increased risk of serious complications for themselves and for babies.
A new group of trials funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) showed that pregnant women can safely limit their weight gain with diet and exercise interventions . The trials included a diverse socioeconomic group, which means that the results can be generalized to a large population.
"This is an important study because it states that women can change behaviors to control the amount of weight gained during pregnancy," said lead author Dr. Alan Peaceman.
However, the reduced weight gain – about four pounds per woman – did not result in any obstetric complications, including cesarean section, diabetes, hypertension, and preeclampsia, or changed the average birthweight of the baby.
"We think that by the time these women are already in the second trimester, it may already be too late to change important results.To reduce the risk of obstetric complications, they may need to change their lifestyle. before or immediately after conception. " added Peaceman.
The researchers hope that the interventions will have longer-term beneficial effects in infants, such as a decrease in childhood obesity or a decrease in the number of metabolic abnormalities such as diabetes in children.
Seven teams of investigators recruited 1,150 participants for the LIFE-Mom trials (579 women had a lifestyle intervention, 571 standard care), ranging from the second trimester to the birth. Each trial offered a varied lifestyle intervention, but all were aimed at improving the quality of diet and reducing calories, increasing physical activity, and incorporating behavioral strategies such as diet and lifestyle. ; self-monitoring.
Overweight and obese women are a critical group to target because they have higher rates of weight gain during pregnancy. They are also more likely to have obese children.
About 62% of women in the intervention groups, compared to 75% in the control groups, exceeded the National Academy of Medicine's recommendations for weight gain during pregnancy. The recommendation is that overweight women limit their weight gain to 15 to 25 pounds and obese women to 11 to 20 pounds, compared to 25 to 35 pounds for non-overweight women.
The fact that so many women in the intervention groups continue to exceed the recommended weight gain shows that it is difficult to encourage pregnant women to follow the diet and levels of body weight. recommended activity at a time when excess food and reluctance to exercise tend to increase.
In the early 2000s, physicians began to notice that excessive weight gain during pregnancy was associated with certain complications of pregnancy: higher incidence of high blood pressure, gestational diabetes, and cesarean section.
"Then we started to see more disturbing things, excessive breast weight gain was not only associated with larger babies, but these babies had an increased risk of obesity and childhood diabetes" said Peaceman.
"That's why the NIH has recognized the need to conduct this study in diverse populations and with standardized clinical outcome measures, and it provides more reliable evidence," said Peaceman.
The study was published in the Journal of Obesity.
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