Obesity in women can cause problems for their newborns

A major study has revealed that obese women are at a higher risk of having babies with serious birth defects.

Health problems in babies which have been previously linked to their mothers’ weight include congenital heart defects, anomalies of the digestive system and malformations of genital organs or limbs.

The study, which used data from 1.2 million live births in Sweden between 2001 and 2014, is the first to show that babies of women who are overweight, but not clinically obese, are also at greater risk of having health issues in the first year of life. While the additional risk was small for women who were slightly above the healthy weight range, the progressive increase in risk made it clear that the link between obesity and health in mothers and children respectively was causal.

Martin Nevis, the study’s senior author, said: “In terms of risk, it is better to be normal weight than overweight and much better to be normal weight than obese. Severe obesity confers excess risk for so many other negative outcomes for pregnancy: pre-eclampsia, diabetes, still-birth. It’s really not a good place to be.”