Association between maternal nutrition and preterm birth: a scoping review

Preterm birth is the leading cause of mortality in children globally under the age of 5 years. A universal, daily necessity, nutrition has potential for intervention to modulate the risk of preterm birth. This scoping review aimed to synthesize evidence on nutrition as an interventional tool to reduce the risk of preterm birth.

PubMed, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Web of Science, Cochrane database, Embase, and Google Scholar were searched for relevant studies published between 2000 and 2023.

Inclusion criteria were human pregnancy populations with dietary interventions intended to modulate the risk of preterm birth. Original research articles, cohort studies, cross-sectional studies, and randomized controlled trials were included, and papers with results not yet reported, nonoriginal research articles, and studies where exposure or intervention was not reported were excluded.

For this scoping review, databases were searched using the Problem, Concept, Context framework (Problem: Spontaneous preterm birth; Concept: nutrition; Context: Antenatal period). Data were analyzed, risk of bias was assessed, and evidence was summarized based on the results.

From 1664 citations, data were extracted from 74 studies. The studies were divided into 3 categories, and the following recommendations are presented based on the results: CONCLUSION: Nutrition plays an important role in preterm birth. Synthesis of evidence on dietary behavior is useful for women, their healthcare providers, and legislators and regulatory bodies that support them.