Maternal Anemia in Various Trimesters and its Effect on Newborn Weight and Maturity: An Observational Study

Background: anemia has been a very important nutritional disorderin the world. india has reported high prevalence of anemia inpregnancy. most of the articles have reported an adverse pregnancyoutcome related to anemia. of late, reports are emerging suggestinganemia could be indeed beneficial. apart from that, there was noconsistency in the timing of hemoglobin considered for analysis.hence, we designed an observational study to look into these aspects.methods: 1000 mothers admitted for delivery were recruited andtheir hemoglobin was measured. hemoglobin in previous trimesterswas noted from their antenatal record. we followed up these motherstill delivery and looked into the gestation and birth weight of thebabies. descriptive statistics was used for baseline characteristics.comparison of means was done using student’s t-test. qualitativevariables were compared using fisher’s exact test.results: more than 50% of the mothers were anemic at some pointof time during their pregnancy and 39% of the mothers were anemicthroughout. mean birth weight of babies born to anemic motherswas marginally lower compared to that of babies born to nonanemicmothers. this difference was statistically significant. there was 6.5%increase in the incidence of low birth weight babies and 11.5%increase in preterm deliveries in mothers who were anemic in theirthird trimester.conclusions: the incidence of low birth weight babies wassignificantly more in mothers who were anemic in their third trimester.preterm deliveries occurred more frequently in mothers who wereanemic in their second and third trimesters. higher hemoglobin didnot show any effect on either birth weight or gestation in our study.