Document Type

Article

Language

eng

Publication Date

2017

Publisher

BioMed Central

Source Publication

BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth

Source ISSN

1471-2393

Abstract

Background

Cesarean delivery accounts for nearly one-third of all births in the U.S. and contributes to an additional $38 billion in healthcare costs each year. Although Cesarean delivery has a long record of improving maternal and neonatal mortality and morbidity, increased utilization over time has yielded public health concerns and calls for reductions. Observational evidence suggests Cesarean delivery is associated with increased maternal postpartum weight, which may have significant implications for the obesity epidemic. Previous literature, however, typically does not address selection biases stemming from correlations of pre-pregnancy weight and reproductive health with Cesarean delivery.

Methods

We used fetal malpresentation as a natural experiment as it predicts Cesarean delivery but is uncorrelated with pre-pregnancy weight or maternal health. We used hospital administrative data (including fields used in vital birth record) from the state of Wisconsin from 2006 to 2013 to create a sample of mothers with at least two births. Using propensity score methods, we compared maternal weight prior to the second pregnancy of mothers who delivered via Cesarean due to fetal malpresentation to mothers who deliver vaginally.

Results

We found no evidence that Cesarean delivery in the first pregnancy causally leads to greater maternal weight, BMI, or movement to a higher BMI classification prior to the second pregnancy.

Conclusions

After accounting for correlations between pre-pregnancy weight, gestational weight gain, and mode of delivery, there is no evidence of a causal link between Cesarean delivery and maternal weight retention.

Comments

Published version. BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, Vol. 17, No. 343 (2017): 1-7. DOI. © The Author(s). 2017 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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