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Prepregnancy body mass and weight gain during pregnancy in India and sub-Saharan Africa
Authors: Diane Coffey
Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), 112(11) 3302-3307; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1416964112
Topic(s): Body Mass Index (BMI)
Maternal health
Nutrition
Obesity
Reproductive health
Women's health
Country: Asia
  India
Africa
  Multiple African Countries
Published: FEB 2015
Abstract: Despite being wealthier, Indian children are significantly shorter and smaller than African children. These differences begin very early in life, suggesting that they may in part reflect differences in maternal health. By applying reweighting estimation strategies to the Demographic and Health Surveys, this paper reports, to my knowledge, the first representative estimates of prepregnancy body mass index and weight gain during pregnancy for India and sub-Saharan Africa. I find that 42.2% of prepregnant women in India are underweight compared with 16.5% of prepregnant women in sub-Saharan Africa. Levels of prepregnancy underweight for India are almost seven percentage points higher than the average fraction underweight among women 15–49 y old. This difference in part reflects a previously unquantified relationship among age, fertility, and underweight; childbearing is concentrated in the narrow age range in which Indian women are most likely to be underweight. Further, because weight gain during pregnancy is low, averaging about 7 kg for a full-term pregnancy in both regions, the average woman in India ends pregnancy weighing less than the average woman in sub-Saharan Africa begins pregnancy. Poor maternal health among Indian women is of global significance because India is home to one fifth of the world’s births. Key words: maternal health, nutrition, India, sub-Saharan Africa Significance Because India—home to one fifth of all births—has no monitoring system for maternal health, basic facts about maternal nutrition are unknown. Using statistically adjusted nationally representative survey data, this paper presents, to my knowledge, the first estimates of prepregnancy body mass and weight gain during pregnancy in India and compares them with sub-Saharan Africa: 42.2% of Indian women are underweight when they begin pregnancy compared with 16.5% of African women. In both regions, women gain little weight during pregnancy, but because of prepregnancy deficits, Indian women end pregnancy weighing less than African women do at the beginning. Deficits in maternal nutrition could help explain the Asian enigma, the puzzle of why Indian children are much smaller than their relative wealth predicts.
Web: http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/112/11/3302.full.pdf