WEDNESDAY, May 8, 2019 (HealthDay News) — Optimal gestational weight gain has limited predictive value for adverse pregnancy outcomes, according to research published in the May 7 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Romy Gaillard, M.D., Ph.D., from the Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and colleagues examined the correlation of ranges of gestational weight gain with risk for adverse maternal and infant outcomes in an individual participant-level meta-analysis using data from 196,670 participants within 25 cohort studies, collected between 1989 and 2015. A validation sample included individual participant-level data from 3,505 participants.

The researchers found that any adverse outcome occurred in 37.2 percent of women, ranging from 34.7 percent of women categorized as underweight to 61.1 percent of women categorized as obesity grade 3. The optimal gestational weight gain ranges were 14.0 to <16.0 kg for underweight women; 10.0 to <18.0 kg for normal-weight women; 2.0 to <16.0 kg for overweight women; 2.0 to <6.0 kg for women obesity grade 1; weight loss or gain of 0 to <4.0 kg for women obesity grade 2; and weight gain of 0 to <6.0 kg for women obesity grade 3. These gestational weight gain ranges correlated with low to moderate discrimination between those with and without adverse outcomes, with the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve ranging from 0.55 to 0.76. In the validation sample, the results for discriminative performance were similar.

“Prepregnancy body mass index was more strongly associated with adverse maternal and infant outcomes than the amount of gestational weight gain,” the authors write.

One author disclosed financial ties to the nutrition industry; a second author disclosed ties to the pharmaceutical and medical device industries.

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