Age at Pregnancy, Menarche Most Important Predictive Factors of Weight Gain.

2001 JAN 18 - (NewsRx.com) -- Women who experience their first pregnancy or their first menstruation at a young age have an increased risk of post-pregnancy obesity, researchers say.

E.P. Gunderson and colleagues working under the aegis of the Kaiser Permanente health maintenance organization conducted a study to "assess the relationships between gestational gain, race/ethnicity, reproductive history, age, education, and the risk of becoming overweight after pregnancy. "

Gunderson et al. evaluated data from 1,300 white, black, Latina, and Asian women between the ages of 18 and 41 who had given birth to a single healthy child between 1980 and 1990 ("The relative importance of gestational gain and maternal characteristics associated with the risk of becoming overweight after pregnancy," International Journal of Obesity, December 2000;24( 12): 1660-1668).

A total of 72 women out of the 1,128 women studied who were not previously overweight defined here as a body mass index of greater than or equal to 26.0 kg/[m.sup.2] - become obese after their first pregnancy, a rate of 6.4%, study data showed.

The researchers were able to isolate several factors that significantly and independently predicted postpartum obesity. Women who were younger than 30 when they became pregnant were almost three times more likely to become overweight after the birth of their baby, according to their report. In addition, women who become pregnant less than eight years after ...