Abstract
With increasingly adverse lifestyles, young women in many countries have rapid weight
gain and rising obesity. In keeping with this, most pregnant women exceed recommended
gestational weight gain (GWG) and then retain weight postpartum. The consequences
of excess GWG include maternal risks during pregnancy, neonatal risks and maternal
obesity and chronic disease longer term, presenting a significant public health and
economic burden worldwide. This article discusses the adverse maternal and infant
risks with excess GWG apparent from observational studies, summarizes the existing
guidelines for optimal GWG and highlights the need for further research to identify
optimal GWG recommendations across the different ethnicities and weight ranges.
We also review the evidence for lifestyle interventions in pregnancy to prevent excess
GWG and highlighting the work underway to integrate large scale meta-analyses of individual
patient data from lifestyle intervention studies to inform clinical practice beyond
current observational data. Finally, we address the need to implement lifestyle interventions
into routine pregnancy care to improve short and long term maternal health outcomes.
Keywords
gestational weight gain (GWG) - outcomes - intervention - body mass index (BMI)
