%0 Journal Article
%T Epidemiology of underweight and overweight-obesity among term pregnant Sudanese women
%A Duria A Rayis
%A Ameer O Abbaker
%A Yasir Salih
%A Tayseer E Diab
%A Ishag Adam
%J BMC Research Notes
%D 2010
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1756-0500-3-327
%X Out of 1690 term pregnant women, 628 (37.1%) were primigravidae, 926 (54.8%) had ¡Ý secondary educational level (minimum of 8 years) and 1445 (85.5%) were housewives. The mean (SD) of the age and parity were 27.2 (6.3) years and 2.0 (2.1) respectively. Out of these 1690 women, 94(5.5%) were underweight (BMI of ¡Ü 19.9 Kg/m2), 603 (35.6%) were overweight (BMI of 25 - 29.9 Kg/m2) and 328 (19.4%) were obese (BMI of ¡Ý 30 Kg/m2).In multivariate analyses, obesity was positively associated with age (OR = 1.2, 95% CI = 1.0-1.1; P< 0.001), and with women's education (OR = 1.8, 95% CI = 1.2-2.7; P = 0.001). Obesity was positively associated with parity in univariate analyses only (OR = 1.1, 95% CI = 1.0-1.2; P = 0.02)The high prevalence of obesity in these pregnant women represents a competing public health problem in Sudan. More research is needed.Many developing countries are currently affected by high rates of overweight that in some cases surpass underweight as a public health nutritional problem. Recent reports showed that, in many developing countries e.g. Bangladesh, Nepal, and India, the prevalence of overweight-obesity in women of reproductive age has risen steadily in the last two decades [1]. In the case of Africa, recent analyses of national data on body mass index (BMI) from women showed that, the prevalence of overweight-obesity exceeded that of underweight [2].Increasing BMI is associated with increased incidence of pre-eclampsia, gestational hypertension, macrosomia, induction of labor and caesarean delivery [3]. We have recently observed that, both type of malnutrition (underweight and overweight-obesity) were associated with poor pregnancy outcomes in pregnant Sudanese women [4,5]. Generally few data are available concerning epidemiology of obesity during pregnancy in Sub-Saharan Africa and none available for Sudan the largest African country with 40 million populations. Sudan has traditionally been known as to have the highest rates of poverty -and may be und
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1756-0500/3/327