Maternal body composition in relation to infant birth weight and subcutaneous adipose tissue

Infant birth weight has increased recently, representing an obstetric and potentially a public health problem since high birth weight involves a risk of obesity later in life. Maternal nutritional status is important for fetal growth and therefore relationships between maternal body weight and composition v. birth weight and infant subcutaneous adipose tissue were investigated in twenty-three healthy women and their newborn infants using multiple and simple linear regression analysis. Furthermore, using previously published data for nineteen infants, it was demonstrated that an anthropometric method could provide useful estimates of the amount of subcutaneous adipose tissue. Birth weight was correlated with the maternal content of total body fat (TBF) both before pregnancy and in gestational week 32 and, together with gestational age at birth, TBF (%) before pregnancy explained 45% of the variation in birth weight. This figure was not increased when gestational gains in weight or TBF were added to the model. Furthermore, in infants, birth weight correlated with the amount of their subcutaneous adipose tissue. Together maternal TBF (%) and amount of subcutaneous adipose tissue in infants explained 61-63% of the variation in birth weight while the amount of infant subcutaneous adipose tissue alone explained only 55%. The maternal TBF content is likely to be important for the recent increase in birth weight. This factor probably causes a general augmentation in fetal growth rather than a specific stimulation of adipose tissue growth.