Risk for Sudden Unexpected Infant Death Increased With Maternal Obesity

WEDNESDAY, July 31, 2024 (HealthDay News) — Infants born to mothers with obesity have an increased risk for sudden unexpected infant death (SUID), according to a study published online July 29 in JAMA Pediatrics.

Darren Tanner, Ph.D., from the AI for Good Research Lab at Microsoft Corporation in Redmond, Washington, and colleagues examined whether maternal obesity is a risk factor for SUID in a U.S. nationwide cohort study using U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Center for Health Statistics linked birth-infant death records for birth cohorts in 2015 through 2019. Of 18,857,694 live births eligible for analysis, 16,545 died of SUID (rate, 0.88 per 1,000 live births).

The researchers found that compared with mothers with normal body mass index (BMI, 18 to 24.9 kg/m²), infants born to mothers with obesity had a higher SUID risk after confounder adjustment, which increased with increasing obesity severity. The risks increased for infants of mothers with class I, class II, and class III obesity (adjusted odds ratios, 1.10, 1.20, and 1.39, respectively). Increased BMI was monotonically associated with increased SUID risk in a generalized additive model, with an acceleration of the risk for BMIs greater than about 25 to 30 kg/m². Overall, about 5.4 percent of SUID cases could be attributed to maternal obesity.

“As the obesity epidemic in the United States and around the world continues to accelerate, maternal obesity is likely to play an increasingly larger role in SUID prevalence over time,” the authors write. “As our findings are observational, future work is needed to elucidate the specific causal mechanisms for the obesity-SUID association.”

Abstract/Full Text

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