Prepregnancy Overweight and Obesity in Kuwait Birth Cohort Study.
Abdullah Al-Taiar, Ali H Ziyab, Eelaf A Husain and 5 others
PMID 41250812WHAT IT FOUND
In Kuwait, 28.82% of analyzed pregnant women were obese and 37.92% were overweight before pregnancy.
Older age, earlier menarche, more children, and fertility treatment were associated with prepregnancy overweight or obesity.
Key findings
01Among 989 women analyzed, prepregnancy obesity was 28.82% and overweight was 37.92%.
02In adjusted analysis, age at recruitment, age of menarche, total number of children, and receiving treatment to aid conception were associated with prepregnancy overweight or obesity.
03Among overweight women, 43.43% described their weight as higher than normal, while more than half described their weight as normal.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
Prepregnancy weight and height were self-reported, and BMI does not directly measure body fat. Only 989 of 1108 women could recall prepregnancy weight and height, so some recruited women were not included. Underweight women were omitted from the main regression because only 24 were underweight, and morbidly obese women were grouped with obese women, so these groups were not analyzed separately. The study is observational, so the associated factors are markers rather than proven causes. Diet and physical activity data were collected during pregnancy, so they could not be treated as prepregnancy risk factors.
Declared interests
The work was supported by Kuwait University Research Project MC01/15. The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read age, menarche, number of children, or fertility treatment as causes of prepregnancy obesity. This was an observational cohort analysis, and it did not test whether weight-management advice or treatment improves pregnancy outcomes.