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Obese
Black Mothers Put Newborns at Risk:
Study Finds Obesity has no Effect on Babies from
White Mothers
A study
led by the University of South Florida sheds new light on
obesity’s role in the black-white gap in infant mortality,
reports sciencedaily.com. While maternal obesity appears to have no
impact on the early survival of infants born to white women, the
situation is different for black women, researchers report in the June
2008 issue of the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology.
Infants of obese
black mothers had a higher risk of death in the first 27 days following
birth than newborns of obese white mothers, the researchers found.
Furthermore, this black disadvantage in neonatal infant mortality
widened with an increase in the body mass index (BMI).
“Even if the infant of an obese black woman survives pregnancy,
labor and delivery, that baby is at greater risk of dying than a baby
born to an obese white woman,” said the study’s lead author
Hamisu Salihu, MD, PhD, associate professor of epidemiology at the USF
College of Public Health.
The researchers analyzed more than 1.4 million births recorded from
Missouri’s vital records database, covering the period 1978
through 1997. The database linked black and white mother-infant pairs.
Among all women, the likelihood of neonatal death (up to 27 days
following death) and early neonatal death (up to six days following
death) was 20 percent greater than for nonobese women, the researcher
found.
Further analysis revealed that the higher risk of neonatal deaths among
newborns of obese mothers was confined to blacks only. The rate of
neonatal deaths increased significantly with rising BMIs of black women
(ranging from 50 to 100-percent increments). However, the offspring of
obese white mothers, regardless of the severity of maternal obesity,
had no greater risk of neonatal death than the newborns of nonobese
women.
The black-white disparity in infant mortality persisted even when the
researchers adjusted for certain obesity-associated medical
complications more prevalent in black women — high blood
pressure, diabetes and preeclampsia.
“This further confirms our findings that high BMI is an
independent risk factor for neonatal mortality among blacks but not
whites,” Dr. Salihu said.
The researchers also controlled for the amount of prenatal care
received since another possible explanation for the black-white
disparity may be that obese white women have better access to prenatal
care than black women. Their results suggested otherwise, but Dr.
Salihu cautions that more study is needed. “We cannot dismiss
access to care as a factor because the quantity of prenatal care does
not take into account the quality of care received,” he said.
Dr. Salihu suggests that differences in the way fat is distributed in
white and black women may play a role in their newborns’
survival. Studies have shown that fat tucked deep inside the waistline
may be worse for adults’ health than fat padding the rest of the
body. “If we can understand more about the potential association
between fat distribution in mothers and likelihood of death in their
babies, we might have an avenue for prevention and narrowing the
persistent black-white gap in infant mortality,” he said.
The latest study builds on another published last year by Dr. Salihu
and colleagues, which reported that the risk for obesity-associated
stillbirth was 50 percent greater among blacks than whites.
Dr. Salihu is director of the Center for Research and Evaluation at the
Chiles Center for Healthy Mothers and Babies at USF. The study was
supported by a young clinical scientist award to Dr. Salihu by the
Flight Attendant Medical Research Institute. Researchers from UMDNJ
School of Public Health in New Jersey and the University of Alabama in
Birmingham were coauthors of the study.
Source: sciencedaily.com
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