Pre-pregnancy obesity increases risk for neurocognitive problems in premature babies
The study is published in the current online issue of The Journal of Pediatrics . "Roughly one-third of women entering pregnancy are either overweight or obese in this country, and that is a cause for concern," said the study's lead author Elizabeth T. Jensen, Ph.D., assistant professor of epidemiology in the division of public health sciences at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. "There is accumulating medical evidence that there is a relationship between maternal obesity and neurocognitive function in children, and our study adds to this evidence." Jensen and her colleagues conducted the study to assess the association between maternal pre-pregnancy body mass index (BMI) and weight gain during pregnancy and children's later cognitive abilities. The study included 535 children previously enrolled in the NIH-funded, multi-center Extremely Low Gestational Age Newborns study. The research team evaluated the relationship of both pre-pregnancy BMI and...