WASHINGTON, May 31 (UPI) -- Recent studies indicate that overweight women are more likely to give birth to babies with medical complications.
For example, children are more likely to have birth defects such as spina bifida and gastroschisis if their mothers are obese.
"Babies are bigger for their age now than they were 20 years ago," said Dr. Michael Kramer of McGill University in Montreal during a workshop Thursday at the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies in Washington.
Maternal weight and the chances of birthing stillborn fetuses are also closely related, he said.
Overweight women are also more likely to have babies with congenital heart defects, and their children are at a greater risk of being obese. Women with a high body mass index are also less likely to breast feed and are more likely to have pre-term deliveries.
The panel emphasized that these health risks pertain more to mothers with a high BMI before pregnancy than to women who gain weight during their pregnancy.
Children with diabetic mothers are more likely to suffer from type 2 diabetes themselves, said Dr. Emily Oken from Harvard Medical School.
The panelists agreed that these new findings are important since previous studies were outdated and released at a time when fewer women with high BMIs were having children and were younger.
Fat women get fatter during pregnancies, said Mary Hediger of the National Institutes of Health, and as a result "women are entering pregnancies worse off now than they ever have before," she said.
While the panel said that maternal weight impacts health complications such as childhood obesity and diabetes, the doctors also admitted that there are other factors affecting those medical problems.
"Obesity is a social disease," Kramer said. The key to solving this issue is for doctors to research obesity in this society and compare it to obesity problems throughout the world, he said.
The panel also said the placenta needs to be studied more in relation to these health issues.
"The placenta correlates well with fetal growth," said Dr. Patrick Catalano of MetroHealth Medical Center.
Hediger said that children who have obese mothers are more likely to be exposed to "obesogenic environments." These environments create conditions that can increase obesity, such as unhealthy diets.
Hediger also said new studies are finally including minorities, which contrasted greatly with older studies on maternal weight. She said women from certain minorities, such as Hispanics and African-Americans, tend to have different BMIs from the women whose maternal weight was studied in older reports. This new change in findings needs to be considered by doctors when focusing on maternal weight, Hediger said.
Yet the general consensus from the panel was that the women now need to be more considerate of weight gain before and during pregnancies.
"My overall observation would be that entering pregnancies at a healthy weight is ideal," Dr. Robert Whitaker from the Mathmatica Policy Research Institute told United Press International. "And for those who don't, they ought to ask their obstetrician what a healthy amount of weight to gain is."
