Another Consequence of Maternal Overweight During Pregnancy: Infant Mortality

Obesity is a growing epidemic worldwide among women of reproductive age. To investigate associations between maternal overweight or obesity and infant mortality, researchers conducted a population-based cohort study including some 1,900,000 live-born singletons delivered in Sweden between 1992 and 2010.

In analyses adjusted for year of delivery, maternal age, parity, smoking, education, height, and country of birth, infant death was more common when mothers were overweight or obese during early pregnancy than when mothers had a healthy body-mass index (BMI); those with BMI >35 kg/m² had twice the risk for infant mortality from both preterm births and deaths of term infants. For mothers with BMI ≥40, compared with normal-weight women, infant …