Being overweight is a major cause of complications during pregnancy and childbirth. This applies to both women born in Sweden and women who have immigrated to Sweden, but has not been well studied until now. Interventions that promote a healthy weight have the potential to prevent complications for all women, the researchers concluded. The study was conducted by researchers from Linköping University and Karolinska Institutet and was published in The Lancet Public Health.
In Sweden and similar high-income countries, there are inequalities in women’s health during pregnancy and childbirth. Women who immigrated to Sweden from other countries are more likely to suffer from a range of serious complications than Swedish-born women. Women born in certain parts of the world are at particularly high risk of complications. Although the reasons are not clear, a variety of factors that influence health may contribute to this disparity. One possible factor is weight. When immigrant women from certain regions become pregnant, it is more common for them to be underweight, overweight, or obese (a disease that causes overweight with a BMI of 30 or higher).
“For women born in Sweden, we know that overweight and obesity are associated with many complications during pregnancy and childbirth. Therefore, inequalities in pregnancy complications between women born in different countries “We wanted to investigate whether this could be explained to some extent by physical differences.”If we know there are health inequalities, we want to find out how to identify them so that the next step is to do something about them. “You want to know why,” says Pontus Henriksson, senior associate professor in the School of Health Sciences. Doctor of Caring Science from Linköping University, who led this research.
What’s new in this study is that researchers were able to estimate how many complications such as gestational diabetes would be avoided if all women were of normal weight when they became pregnant.
For example, they concluded that about half of all cases of gestational diabetes could be prevented. This applies to both Swedish-born and foreign-born women. ”
Maryam Shirvanifar, PhD student at Linköping University and lead author of the study
Researchers believe efforts to promote healthy weight can help all women, regardless of where in the world they were born.
“A healthy weight is good for everyone. Obesity is difficult to treat once you have it, so it’s better to start early in life,” says Pontus-Henriksson.
This study paints a complex picture. The importance of weight depends on the comorbidity. For example, high body weight affects gestational diabetes more than other complications.
But how does being underweight early in pregnancy affect your risk? To the researchers’ surprise, being underweight didn’t seem to contribute significantly to the complications they investigated.
In the study, researchers followed nearly 2 million pregnancies, nearly all births in Sweden from 2000 to 2020. Researchers studied eight complications that can affect mothers and babies during and after pregnancy or childbirth. Using data from several national registries, they were able to investigate the relationship between a woman’s BMI at the first antenatal visit and complications depending on which region of the world the mother was born in. It’s done.
The researchers considered several factors in their analysis, including socio-economic data. However, several factors that can influence women’s health during pregnancy and childbirth, such as quality of care in health care, communication barriers, migration-related stress, and differences in health-promoting behaviors, limit the registry. was not able to be investigated in this study. data. Therefore, further research is needed to study more factors that may influence health during pregnancy in different groups.
The research was funded with support from the Swedish Research Council and is a collaboration between LiU and researchers from Karolinska Institutet, in particular Viktor Ahlqvist and Cecilia Magnusson.
In this study, researchers looked at eight different complications in mothers and babies.
– Severe complications in the mother that can be fatal
– preeclampsia
– gestational diabetes
– Infant mortality rate within the first year of life
– Preterm birth (before 37 weeks of gestation) and very preterm birth (before 28 weeks of gestation)
– Low Apgar score (assessment of newborn vitality)
– large baby (in relation to gestational age)
– small baby (in relation to the gestational period)
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Reference magazines:
Shirvanifar, M. et al. (2024). Adverse pregnancy outcomes due to overweight and obesity across maternal birth regions: a Swedish population-based cohort study. Lancet Public Health. doi.org/10.1016/s2468-2667(24)00188-9
