Focus on Pregnancy Health

Preventing weight gain in pregnancy
While the practice of ‘eating for two’ during pregnancy may have been dismissed as an old wives’ tale, the maintenance of a healthy weight through diet and exercise has remained a constant in antenatal care.
Of course, it takes more than telling a patient to eat a well-balanced meal and undertake regular exercise; sometimes intervention is required to achieve prevention of excessive weight gain during pregnancy as a recent report of 11,444 women shows.
The report which is an updated review of 37 studies published between October 2011 and November 2014 found that around 36% of women who were allocated to interventions to help them manage their weight, had excessive weight gain over the course of their pregnancy compared with around 45% in the control groups.
The report indicated that intervention therapy may reduce common conditions related to excessive weight gain in pregnancy such as hypertension, caesarean delivery, macrosomia and neonatal respiratory distress, particularly with combined diet and moderate-level exercise interventions.
“Pregnancy is a time when women have a lot of contact with healthcare providers, therefore there is no better time to engage and support women to make healthy lifestyle choices,” said co-author Tess Lawrie. “We hope that these findings will encourage women not to overeat and to exercise regularly with the knowledge that their efforts will be rewarded with lower pregnancy weight gain and better health outcomes for themselves and their baby.”
UQ finds Mediterranean diet is best for pregnancy health
The University of Queensland’s School of Public Health researchers found that young women who followed a diet rich in vegetables, legumes, nuts, tofu, rice, pasta, rye bread, red wine and fish before pregnancy had a 42 per cent lower risk of developing gestational hypertension and pre-eclampsia.
The researchers analysed dietary information relating to 6149 pregnancies in 3582 women aged 25 to 30 years in 2003, through data from the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health.
Predicting perinatal depression
The Murdoch Childrens Research Institute has found a strong connection between mental health in life prior to getting pregnant, and perinatal depression.
The findings of the study support the idea that perinatal depression is actually a continuation of previous mental health problems experienced earlier in life and beginning well before pregnancy.
“Our study investigated mental health for many years prior to conception and not just from the point at which a woman recognise she was pregnant like nearly all previous studies. The study further challenges a view of maternal perinatal depression as a unique problem related to the hormonal changes are pregnancy. For the great majority, perinatal depressive symptoms are best considered as a continuation or recurrence of problems beginning well before pregnancy,” said lead researcher, Professor George Patton.
The study found two thirds of all mothers had a prior history of mental health problems at some point in adolescence. Overall there was a preconception history of mental health symptoms in 85 per cent of pregnancies with perinatal depressive symptoms.
“The fact that perinatal depression overwhelmingly occurs in women who have had
depression before is important. This suggests that greater attention to women who have a long history of mental health problems prior to pregnancy. Counselling and putting in place the right emotional and social supports for these women could be very helpful,” Professor Patton said.
Maternal perinatal depression is one of the clearest predictors of healthy emotional and intellectual development in children. Women who suffered from problems with depression and anxiety in adolescence through to young adulthood have a greater than one in three chance of having high levels of perinatal depressive symptoms.