Obese Women Give Birth to Babies with Vitamin D Deficiency

Obese women are at a higher risk of giving birth to babies with vitamin D deficiency, a new study says.

For the analysis, a team of researchers from the Northwestern University included 61 pregnant women and their newborns. The participants' body mass index (BMI) was measured and recorded.

Blood samples of the participants at 36 and 38 weeks of gestational age and umbilical cord blood samples drawn from babies after birth were used to determine vitamin D levels. Body fat, weight and volume of the infants was also recorded. Both obese and thin women had similar levels of vitamin D during the last stages of pregnancy.

However, researchers found babies of women who were thin during pregnancy having a threefold higher amount of vitamin D levels compared to babies of women who were obese.

"Nearly all of mothers in this study reported taking prenatal vitamins, which may be the reason why their own vitamin D levels were sufficient, but the babies born to the obese mothers had reduced levels of vitamin D,"  Jami L. Josefson, first author of the study, said in a news release. "It's possible that vitamin D may get sequestered in excess fat and not transferred sufficiently from an obese pregnant woman to her baby."

Surprisingly, researchers found babies with high vitamin D levels having high body fat.

"What was novel about this study was that we found babies born with higher vitamin D levels had more body fat. That's in contrast to studies in children and adults who have an inverse relationship between levels of vitamin D and body fat, where the higher their vitamin D, the lower their fat," Josefson said.

Concerned with the findings, researchers urge obese women to take vitamin D supplementations during pregnancy to avoid this occurrence.

The results of the study have been published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.

Vitamin D is essential for bone growth in children and a deficiency can lead to rickets, a bone-softening disease, among young ones.