Mom’s weight in early pregnancy associated with child’s cerebral palsy

ANN ARBOR'Being overweight or obese during pregnancy increases the chance of having a child with cerebral palsy, according to new research led by the University of Michigan School of Public Health and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. And the more overweight mom is, the more likely she is to have a child that develops the neurological disorder characterized by a loss or impairment of motor function, said lead author Eduardo Villamor, U-M professor of epidemiology. "Each degree of obesity severity during pregnancy increased the chances a child would be diagnosed with cerebral palsy," Villamor said. "Compared with women of normal weight, women with overweight had a 22 percent higher rate, whereas women with severe obesity had more than twice (more than 100 percent increase) the rate." Women with overweight have a body mass index of 25-29.9 and those with obesity have a BMI of 30 or higher. The study, believed to be the first to show the association between mother's weight and cerebral palsy using data from an entire country, appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Villamor and colleagues say that maternal obesity increases the risk of neonatal asphyxia, which most likely explains the development of CP later in life. This applies only to full-term births.