A Weight-gain-for-gestational-age Z Score Chart for the Assessment of Maternal Weight Gain in Pregnancy

Overview

Journal Am J Clin Nutr

Publisher Elsevier

Specialty Nutritional Sciences

Date 2013 Mar 8

PMID 23466397

Citations 93

Authors

Jennifer A Hutcheon

Robert W Platt

Barbara Abrams

Katherine P Himes

Hyagriv N Simhan

Lisa M Bodnar

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Background: To establish the unbiased relation between maternal weight gain in pregnancy and perinatal health, a classification for maternal weight gain is needed that is uncorrelated with gestational age.

Objective: The goal of this study was to create a weight-gain-for-gestational-age percentile and z score chart to describe the mean, SD, and selected percentiles of maternal weight gain throughout pregnancy in a contemporary cohort of US women.

Design: The study population was drawn from normal-weight women with uncomplicated, singleton pregnancies who delivered at the Magee-Womens Hospital in Pittsburgh, PA, 1998-2008. Analyses were based on a randomly selected subset of 648 women for whom serial prenatal weight measurements were available through medical chart record abstraction (6727 weight measurements).

Results: The pattern of maternal weight gain throughout gestation was estimated by using a random-effects regression model. The estimates were used to create a chart with the smoothed means, percentiles, and SDs of gestational weight gain for each week of pregnancy.

Conclusion: This chart allows researchers to express total weight gain as an age-standardized z score, which can be used in epidemiologic analyses to study the association between pregnancy weight gain and adverse or physiologic pregnancy outcomes independent of gestational age.

Citing Articles

Methods for modeling gestational weight gain: empirical application using electronic health record data from a safety net population.

Booman A, Vesco K, Springer R, Dinh D, Liu S, Lyon-Scott K BMC Pregnancy Childbirth. 2025; 25(1):35.

PMID: 39825224 PMC: 11740392. DOI: 10.1186/s12884-025-07139-5.

The impact of cohort inclusion/exclusion criteria on pregnancy weight gain chart percentiles.

Rangel Bousquet Carrilho T, Bodnar L, Johansson K, Kac G, Hutcheon J Br J Nutr. 2024; 132(6):751-761.

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Maternal Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States: An Interrupted Time-series Analysis.

Jackson K, Karasek D, Gemmill A, Collin D, Hamad R Epidemiology. 2024; 35(6):823-833.

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Postpartum Obesity Is Associated With Increases in Child Adiposity in Midchildhood in a Cohort of Black and Dominican Youth.

Foster S, Rundle A, Tsai I, Genkinger J, Burns N, Hoepner L Curr Dev Nutr. 2024; 8(6):103770.

PMID: 38948110 PMC: 11214177. DOI: 10.1016/j.cdnut.2024.103770.

Gestational Weight Gain and Neonatal Biometry during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Multicenter Observational Cohort.

Abdelwahab M, de Voest J, Metz T, Hughes B, Grobman W, Saade G Am J Perinatol. 2024; 42(2):189-195.

PMID: 38810962 PMC: 11666801. DOI: 10.1055/a-2335-2480.

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