Health Inequalities in Pregnancy-related Obesity and Overweight

• In Event: 546 - Section on Sociology of Population Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 10. Reproductive Health and Child Mortality

Abstract

Background: Obesity and overweight are not randomly distributed in the population, and strong disparities according to socioeconomic status and racial/ethnic origin exist. In the search for the causes of this epidemic, pregnancy-related weight gain has begun to receive growing attention.
Methods: Data come from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79). This prospective cohort is nationally representative of the U.S. population of individuals aged 14 to 22 years in 1979. Having followed for 23 cycles of data collection and over 27 years these respondents’ lives, it constitutes one of the richest sources for repeated, prospective information on socioeconomic, fertility and pregnancy-related weight dynamics. Out of the 4,926 women aged 14-22 included in the sample in 1979, we considered 1,890 parous women who were followed over the bulk of their reproductive lives.
Results: Women returned to their pre-pregnancy BMI within 1.6 years after delivery on average and that those who reached a healthy BMI did so in about 2 years on average. This hazard of returning decreased with age, and was higher among minorities and women who had completed less than a high school degree (we only looked at women who were nulliparous in 1983, when they should all have completed a high school degree). Most notably, the findings highlighted a strong path dependency with pre-pregnancy BMI whereby obese and overweight women returned to their pre-pregnancy BMI the fastest and in the largest proportion, while they were the least likely and slowest to reach a healthy BMI post-pregnancy.

Authors

• Emilie Renahy, McGill Universtity

• Amelie Quesnel-Vallee, McGill University