Loading...
More than half of U.S. women aged 20 to 39 years are overweight or obese. To investigate the risk for stillbirth in obese women, researchers evaluated data on singleton births in Missouri from 1978 through 1997. Prepregnancy body mass index was used to classify mothers into four subsets: normal weight (BMI, 18.5–24.9), class I obesity (30–34.9), class II (35–39.9), and extreme obesity (≥40). Stillbirth was defined as in utero fetal death at 20 weeks’ gestation or later.
Among more than 1.4 million mother-fetus pairs, about 9.5% of the mothers were obese. Obesity was more prevalent among blacks than whites (12.8% vs. 8.9%). Compared with normal-weight women, obese women were significantly more likely to experience stillbirth (adjusted hazard …