Women who are significantly overweight while pregnant are more likely to report higher levels of wheezing in their babies, new research has found.
The study, presented at a medical conference in Trinity College Dublin today, found mothers with a higher Body Mass Index (BMI), a standard measure of obesity, reported a higher incidence of wheezing in their children.
The research, funded by the Organisation for Health Research and Development in Holland, followed 5,000 pregnant women and their children during and after pregnancy.
Maternal BMI, which takes into account both height and weight, was determined before pregnancy and the mothers themselves reported back on the health of their babies.
“This is the first time that pre-pregnancy BMI has been linked to increased wheezing in offspring”, said lead researcher Annick de Vries, from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, in Belgium.
“This implies that the weight of the mother before pregnancy can potentially affect the offspring's immune responses,” she said.
The study said the findings were independent of the effects of maternal asthma, shorter duration of exclusive breast-feeding, and the sex of the child, which have also been found to also predict wheezing.
With the increasing prevalence of obesity in women of child-bearing age, researchers said the study highlighted the importance of weight management before pregnancy.
A recent study, carried out by researchers at UCD’s Centre for Human Reproduction in the Coombe Hospital in Dublin, found women who were obese during pregnancy suffered an “alarmingly” high rate of medical complications.
The study, which analysed data from 5,824 women who delivered a baby at the Coombe in 2007, found pregnancy in severely obese women was complicated by hypertension in 35.8 per cent of cases, and by gestational diabetes in 20 per cent of women.
The complications necessitated an extremely high rate of obstetric intervention, the study noted, with the hospital witnessing an induction rate of 42 per cent in obese women, and a Caesarean rate of 45 per cent.