Mom’s Obesity May Up Risk Of Birth Defects

Women who are obese before pregnancy may have a higher risk of giving birth to a baby with major birth defects, new research suggests.

If pregnant women are obese, they face a risk of having babies with birth defects than women who are with a healthy weight. If a pregnant woman is obese, she has to face many health complications like premature delivery, seizures, and fetal death.

Prenatal care is important because it is complicated as uterine size measurement and ultrasound test can be more difficult.

Women who are obese before pregnancy face a higher risk of having babies with a variety of birth defects than women with a healthy weight, a new study suggests.The results involving nearly 15,000 women from eight states found abnormalities of the spine, heart, arms, legs and abdomen, building on previous research that showed heart and spine defects.

The greatest risk was for spina bifida.Obese women faced double the risk of having babies with spina bifida than women of healthy weight. With spina bifida, the most common disabling birth defect in the United States, the spinal column fails to close properly. That often leads to leg paralysis, learning difficulties and other serious problems.

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Birth defects with obesity:

Obesity during pregnancy makes your baby at risk of developing birth defects. Some of the birth defects are

Neural tube defects: Baby born to obese mother is at increasing risk of suffering with neural tube defects during developmental stage. Anencephaly and spina bifida are two neural tube defects associated with low folic acid levels during the pregnant woman’s first trimester.

With ultrasound imaging, the defects can be detected early. But obese women produce poor ultrasound scans because of extra fat. The waves have trouble to penetrate through the fat, therefore images with blurr are produced. With this fact, neural tube defects cannot be detected in babies.

Macrosoma: During development, when your baby puts on too much weight, it results in macrosoma. The labor and delivery becomes complicated thereby it becomes difficult for the baby to enter and leave the birth canal. Large baby’s shoulders are injured sometimes during birth, which is known as shoulder dystonia.

Childhood obesity: If the pregnant woman is obese, the child’s weight is influenced even before the child is born. The child will be overweight at the young age of two or three if the mother is obese at the time of pregnancy. If a woman is obese before pregnancy, the child will be nearly three times more likely to be obese by the age of seven.

Obese women with diabetes are prone to have baby with birth defects. Babies born to obese mothers also experience number of problems. Child can have an increased risk of congenital heart defects.

The best thing to avoid birth defects is to maintain healthy weight before becoming pregnant. It helps your unborn child. If the pregnant women are obese, they should work with health care provider to follow a diet regimen so that you can gain appropriate amount of weight during pregnancy. You should adopt health habits and diet even after the giving birth to a baby.