A weight-gain-for-gestational-age z score chart for the assessment of maternal weight gain in pregnancy.

BACKGROUND: To establish the unbiased relation between maternal weight gain in pregnancy and perinatal health, a classification for maternal weight gain is needed that is uncorrelated with gestational age.
OBJECTIVE: The goal of this study was to create a weight-gain-for-gestational-age percentile and z score chart to describe the mean, SD, and selected percentiles of maternal weight gain throughout pregnancy in a contemporary cohort of US women.
DESIGN: The study population was drawn from normal-weight women with uncomplicated, singleton pregnancies who delivered at the Magee-Womens Hospital in Pittsburgh, PA, 1998-2008. Analyses were based on a randomly selected subset of 648 women for whom serial prenatal weight measurements were available through medical chart record abstraction (6727 weight measurements).
RESULTS: The pattern of maternal weight gain throughout gestation was estimated by using a random-effects regression model. The estimates were used to create a chart with the smoothed means, percentiles, and SDs of gestational weight gain for each week of pregnancy.
CONCLUSION: This chart allows researchers to express total weight gain as an age-standardized z score, which can be used in epidemiologic analyses to study the association between pregnancy weight gain and adverse or physiologic pregnancy outcomes independent of gestational age.