That is not all. Another study found that women who are overweight or obese are two thirds more likely to miscarry, and recently the Confidential Inquiry into Maternal and Child Health found that more than half of the 300 women who died after having children between 2003 and 2005 were overweight.
The study from Stanford University School of Medicine in California, which was initially meant to figure out preventable causes of loss of pregnancy, found 53 per cent of unborn child, miscarried by overweight women were normal compared with 37 per cent of babies that were miscarried by women of a healthy weight.
Dr Inna Landres, who led the study and presented the results at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine conference in San Francisco, said, “Obesity predisposes women to miscarry normal babies.”
She said, “It is important to identify elevated Body Mass Index (BMI) as a risk factor for miscarriage and counsel those women who are affected on the importance of lifestyle modification.”
Dr Landres’s possible explanation for the finding were that overweight women had insulin resistance, which affects a woman’s hormones during pregnancy, adding that levels of the hormones oestrogen and androgen, which are raised in overweight women, may also affect the likelihood of a miscarriage.
However, Dr. Sina Adekanmbi, a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist with the Oyo State Hospital Management Board, Ibadan, said for years, many women thought of pregnancy as their ticket to eat anything they wanted, indulging any and all cravings and leaving control by the wayside.
This rational that they were eating for two, Dr Adekanmbi said has, however changed over time because of the risk of excess weight gain in pregnancy on both the pregnant woman and yet to be born child.
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