Objective: To investigate how the 2009 Institute of Medicine (IOM) guidelines for pregnancy weight gain for obese women relate to the longer-term outcome of childhood obesity.
Study design: Maternal, neonatal, soioeconomic, and nutritional histories were collected for mothers with children age 2-5 years old. Women in each body mass index (BMI) category were categorized based on under, appropriate (AG), and over weight gain per IOM guidelines and compared with rates of childhood obesity in each category.
Results: A total of 502 mother-child pairs were enrolled; 36.4% of women were obese at the start of pregnancy. Obese women who were AG by IOM guidelines were more likely than underweight, normal weight, and overweight women to have obese offspring (29.5% vs. 14.2%, p = 0.04). The BMI percentiles of the offspring of obese AG women were 10 percentile points higher than the 55th percentile of the other groups.
Conclusion: The 2009 IOM pregnancy weight gain guidelines for obese women may still be too high when considering longer-term outcomes such as childhood obesity. Further studies are needed.