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Sept. 28, 2006 -- A woman who gains weight after her first pregnancy has a greater risk of developing complications during her second, new research shows.
The large study offers some of the best evidence yet confirming a long suspected, direct link between maternal overweight and obesityobesity and pregnancy complications such as pre-eclampsia, gestational diabetesgestational diabetes, and stillbirth, its authors say.
"Both obesity and these pregnancy complications could have similar causes, so we have not known if it was actually the weight that was really responsible for the pregnancy risk," researcher Eduardo Villamor, MD, of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, tells WebMD.
But, "it turns out that women do not need to become overweight or obese in order to increase their chances of having poor gestational outcomes; only a relatively modest increase in weight between pregnancies could lead to serious illness," Villamor says. Villamor is an assistant professor of international nutritionnutrition at Harvard.
The study is published in the Sept. 30 issue of The Lancet.
Even Normal-Weight Women at Risk
Along with study co-author Sven Cnattingius, MD, of Stockholm's Karolinska Institute, Villamor tracked weight changes among more than 150,000 Swedish women between their first and second pregnancies. The average time between the birth of the first child and estimated date of conception of a second child was two years.
First, they looked at the mother's body mass index (BMI)body mass index (BMI) at the first prenatal visit for each pregnancy. (BMI compares height to weight and is used to evaluate if a person is of normal weight, overweight, or obese.)
Then they looked at the women's pregnancy complications.