Gestational Weight Gain

Since shortly before the release of the 2009 Institute of Medicine report, Weight Gain During Pregnancy: Reexamining the Guidelines ,1 there has been an explosion of research around the amount of weight a woman gains during her pregnancy. For the mother herself, the more weight she gains during pregnancy, the harder it is to return to her prepregnancy weight. Retaining more weight postpartum, especially among women who are already overweight or obese, can lead to lifelong obesity and its cardiovascular consequences. Excessive weight gain in subsequent pregnancies can accentuate this pattern. Furthermore, a higher body mass index (BMI) at the start of a subsequent pregnancy is associated with increased risk of adverse health outcomes for the baby in both short and long term. Article see p 1381 Higher amounts of gestational weight gain can also lead to adverse health consequences in the child. It has long been known that the more the mother gains, the larger the newborn baby. With the advent of the obesity epidemic, epidemiological studies have recently turned to the question of the extent to which gestational weight gain predicts longer-term weight-related outcomes. Given that most cohorts do not have decades of follow-up, the bulk of the research to date has examined outcomes in childhood and adolescence. Most of these studies have shown what we expected—the more the weight gain during pregnancy, the higher the BMI or risk for obesity in the offspring.2–6 In addition to the scarcity of long-term follow-up, few studies have measured cardiometabolic outcomes, and only 1 previous study had done so in adulthood. Among 21-year-old Australian men and women, …