Ashorn, P;
Hallamaa, L;
Allen, LH;
Ashorn, U;
Chandrasiri, U;
Deitchler, M;
Doyle, R;
... Dewey, KG; + view all
(2018)
Co-causation of reduced newborn size by maternal undernutrition, infections, and inflammation.
Maternal and Child Nutrition
10.1111/mcn.12585.
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Abstract
More than 20 million babies are born with low birthweight annually. Small newborns have an increased risk for mortality, growth failure, and other adverse outcomes. Numerous antenatal risk factors for small newborn size have been identified, but individual interventions addressing them have not markedly improved the health outcomes of interest. We tested a hypothesis that in low-income settings, newborn size is influenced jointly by multiple maternal exposures and characterized pathways associating these exposures with newborn size. This was a prospective cohort study of pregnant women and their offspring nested in an intervention trial in rural Malawi. We collected information on maternal and placental characteristics and used regression analyses, structural equation modelling, and random forest models to build pathway maps for direct and indirect associations between these characteristics and newborn weight-for-age Z-score and length-for-age Z-score. We used multiple imputation to infer values for any missing data. Among 1,179 pregnant women and their babies, newborn weight-for-age Z-score was directly predicted by maternal primiparity, body mass index, and plasma alpha-1-acid glycoprotein concentration before 20 weeks of gestation, gestational weight gain, duration of pregnancy, placental weight, and newborn length-for-age Z-score (p < .05). The latter 5 variables were interconnected and were predicted by several more distal determinants. In low-income conditions like rural Malawi, maternal infections, inflammation, nutrition, and certain constitutional factors jointly influence newborn size. Because of this complex network, comprehensive interventions that concurrently address multiple adverse exposures are more likely to increase mean newborn size than focused interventions targeting only maternal nutrition or specific infections.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Co-causation of reduced newborn size by maternal undernutrition, infections, and inflammation |
| Location: | England |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1111/mcn.12585 |
| Publisher version: | http://doi.org/10.1111/mcn.12585 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © 2018 The Authors. Maternal & Child Nutrition published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | LAZ, Malawi, WAZ, low-income countries, newborn size, pathways |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > UCL GOS Institute of Child Health UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > UCL GOS Institute of Child Health > Infection, Immunity and Inflammation Dept |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10041582 |
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