Elsevier

Economics & Human Biology

Volume 18, July 2015, Pages 1-12
Economics & Human Biology

Maternal pre-pregnancy BMI, gestational weight gain, and infant birth weight: A within-family analysis in the United States

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ehb.2015.03.002Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Almost half of mothers were obese, overweight, or underweight before pregnancy.

  • Seventy-one percent of mothers had excessive or inadequate weight gain in pregnancy.

  • Obesity and excessive gestational weight gain increase the high birth weight risk.

  • Underweight and inadequate weight gain in pregnancy raise the low birth weight risk.

  • Maintaining a healthy weight before and during pregnancy should be promoted.

Abstract

In the United States, the high prevalence of unhealthy preconception body weight and inappropriate gestational weight gain among pregnant women is an important public health concern. However, the relationship among pre-pregnancy BMI, gestational weight gain, and newborn birth weight has not been well established. This study uses a very large dataset of sibling births and a within-family design to thoroughly address this issue. The baseline analysis controlling for mother fixed effects indicates maternal preconception overweight, preconception obesity, and excessive gestational weight gain significantly increase the risk of having a high birth weight baby, respectively, by 1.3, 3 and 3.9 percentage points, while underweight before pregnancy and inadequate gestational weight gain increase the low birth weight incidence by 1.4 and 2 percentage points. The benchmark results are robust in a variety of sensitivity checks. Since poor birth outcomes especially high birth weight and low birth weight have lasting adverse impacts on one's health, education, and socio-economic outcomes later in life, the findings of this research suggest promoting healthy weight among women before pregnancy and preventing inappropriate weight gain during pregnancy can generate significant intergenerational benefits.

Introduction

The last two decades have seen a rapid increase in the prevalence of overweight and obesity among American women of reproductive age (National Center for Health Statistics, 2014). Among the women who had delivered live infants, the rate of pre-pregnancy overweight and obesity increased from 23.2% in 1993–1994 to 44.8% in 2009 (Kim et al., 2007, Fisher et al., 2013). As another important concern on pregnant women, excessive gestational weight gain has become increasingly common, even for the women with high body mass index (BMI) before pregnancy (Frederick et al., 2008). In contrast, while maternal obesity is on the rise, pre-pregnancy underweight and gestational inadequate weight gain due to deficient nutrient intake or supplementation remain a significant health problem among low socioeconomic status women. A recent report by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) shows about 32% of the American low income underweight women had inadequate weight gain during pregnancy in 2007 (IOM, 2009). The high prevalence of unhealthy preconception body weight and inappropriate gestational weight gain among pregnant women is of great concern for the public health community. This is because unhealthy BMI before pregnancy and inappropriate weight gain during pregnancy have been linked to poor birth outcomes especially high birth weight (HBW, birth weight >4000 g) and low birth weight (LBW, birth weight <2500 g).

Both HBW and LBW have lasting negative impacts on one's health, education, and socio-economic outcomes. HBW babies are at a greater risk for overweight, obesity, diabetes, cancer, and other disorders later in life (Hjalgrim et al., 2003, Danielzik et al., 2004, Harder et al., 2007, Wei et al., 2007, Mandl et al., 2009). Moreover, HBW negatively affects cognitive function, learning, and school performance (Richards et al., 2001, Kirkegaard et al., 2006, Cesur and Kelly, 2010). LBW is also a costly birth outcome. The short run excess hospital costs of all the LBW singleton births in 1989 were estimated to be at least 1.07 billion (Almond et al., 2005). In the long term, LBW leads to poor health (Currie and Hyson, 1999), developmental problems (Hack et al., 1995), low educational attainment (Conley and Bennett, 2000), and adverse labor market outcomes (Behrman and Rosenzweig, 2004). In the United States, reducing the incidence of adverse birth outcomes has been an important goal of several large-scale social programs. In this sense, findings from investigating the effects of pre-pregnancy BMI and gestational weight gain on newborn birth weight will have strong policy implications.

This research is also related to the empirical studies on Barker's fetal origins perspective (Barker, 1990). By Barker's theory and its extension, under-nutrition and over-nutrition during pregnancy due to adverse fetal environment presage some of the most common health disorders in adult life. Recent studies further show the “fetal origins” effects can extend to a broader range of lifetime outcomes and in particular, poor health at birth is a key pathway through which deficient or excessive nutrient intake during fetal development exerts persistent effects (Almond and Currie, 2011). This study will shed new light on such a pathway, since gestational weight gain is a good measure of nutrition in utero and both HBW and LBW are crucial indicators of poor infant health. Furthermore, exploring the impact of pre-pregnancy BMI on birth weight is important too, because the corresponding estimates capture the intergenerational returns by promoting healthy preconception weight among women. Such often-ignored returns should be incorporated into the cost-benefit analysis of various weight management programs for women of reproductive age (Siega-Riz and Laraia, 2006).

To date, the relationship of pre-pregnancy BMI and gestational weight gain to infant birth weight has not been well established. Some studies only look at the association between preconception BMI and birth weight (Abenhaim et al., 2007, Gilboa et al., 2008, McDonald et al., 2010). Lacking gestational weight gain data, these studies are unable to address how pre-pregnancy BMI affects birth weight net of its impact that operates through influencing gestational nutritional intake, an important policy-relevant issue. Their results are quite mixed. The second body of the literature evaluates the effects of gestational weight gain only, without controlling for preconception body weight (Hediger et al., 1989, Abrams and Selvin, 1995, Hickey et al., 1996, Ludwig and Currie, 2010, McDonald et al., 2011). However, the omitted pre-pregnancy BMI clearly biases the parameter estimate on weight gain, since women in various BMI categories differ systematically in gestational weight gain. The third literature investigates the combined effects of the two birth weight inputs (Doherty et al., 2006, Rode et al., 2007, Frederick et al., 2008, Crane et al., 2009, Bodnar et al., 2010). Past studies on this topic, like the previous two strands of research, rarely deal with the unobserved generic, mother, or family level factors. Such factors, when not controlled for, will confound the relationship between the two inputs and birth weight. Indeed, the results of these studies are varying and inconsistent. Finally, the datasets used in the whole literature above are often selective, cross-sectional, and lack of important socioeconomic control variables.

This study uses a very large dataset of about 0.3 million sibling births to thoroughly evaluate the effects of pre-pregnancy BMI and gestational weight gain on infant birth weight. This dataset has several noteworthy advantages. One, it is constructed from the natality records of all the live births in two states, while much of the prior research uses convenience samples. Two, the dataset records maternal weight and height before pregnancy plus weight at delivery, which makes it feasible to create indicators of both pre-pregnancy BMI and gestational weight gain. Three, it provides a rich set of infant, mother, and family control variables. Four, this panel dataset allows a comparison of birth outcome of singleton births to the same mother. This within-family design can remove the bias due to unobserved mother heterogeneity. Five, the large sample size gives more precise estimates, relative to the previous estimates in the literature.

With this unique dataset, mother fixed effects models are applied to address the effects of maternal preconception body weight and gestational weight gain on the mean birth weight and two tails of the birth weight distribution. The benchmark results suggest preconception overweight, preconception obesity, and excessive gestational weight gain all significantly increase the risk of having a HBW baby, while underweight before pregnancy and inadequate gestational weight gain lead to elevated risks of delivering a LBW infant. Then, a series of sensitivity checks or extensions are performed, where the new results are highly consistent with the baseline estimates.

Section snippets

Data

The dataset of sibling births is constructed from vital statistics natality records in the states of Pennsylvania and Washington1. These natality records in general cover all the live births every year. However, this

Methods

To examine the relationship of maternal pre-pregnancy body weight and gestational weight gain to infant birth weight, the following linear model is used in the benchmark analysis:Yij=α+βBMIij+γGWGij+δXij+μj+εijwhere Yij is a birth weight measure of infant i born to mother j; BMIij is a vector of three pre-pregnancy BMI categories; GWGij is a vector of two gestational weight gain indicators; and Xij is a rich set of infant, mother, and family level control variables (Voigt et al., 2004).

Results

Table 1 reports the summary statistics of the three primary birth weight outcomes, infant characteristics, and the key parental control variables11. Column (1) focuses on the full sample of sibling births. It shows 11% of all the infants are HBW and 5% of them are LBW. About 21% of the babies were delivered by obese women with pre-pregnancy

Conclusion

Poor birth outcomes such as HBW and LBW impose a huge burden on families, the healthcare care system, education, and social services. As such, improving the health and well-being of infants has been a crucial public health goal in the United States. Both pre-pregnancy BMI and gestational weight gain are two key determinants of infant health. However, the exact relationship between the two inputs and newborn birth weight has not been well understood. This article uses a large sample of sibling

Acknowledgements

This paper benefits from helpful comments by Josh Berning, Jeremy Bray, Karen Conway, Anca Cotet, Angela Dills, Zheng Fang, Gregory Gilpin, Jennifer Graves, Tiffany Green, Robert Pollak, Kathleen M. Rasmussen, Anna Maria Siega-Riz and participants of Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management Research Conference, Eastern Economic Association Meeting, Southern Economic Association Meeting, and the Work, Families and Public Policy Workshop in Washington University in Saint Louis.

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