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Home › Articles › Newborn and Infant Months › Low Birth Weight Babies

Low Birth Weight Babies

Causes, Concerns and Outcomes

By Kelly Burgess

Pages:  1  2  3  4  5  

Causes of Low Birth Weight
It's those five factors that have the most significant impact on low birth weight and need further research. Dr. Subramanian says they can be defined as follows:
  • Environmental: Smoking, drinking and drug use. Smoking is a significant factor in low birth weight.
  • Medical: Conditions such as diabetes, pre-eclampsia and kidney disease.
  • IVF: This procedure has caused an increase in multiple births, which is another significant risk factor for low birth weight.
  • Racial-ethnic and Socioeconomic Disparities: Women from this group have poorer pregnancy outcomes overall, for a variety of reasons that are not always well understood.
  • Prenatal Care: Lack of folic acid, poor nutrition, undetected medical issues of the mother or fetus.

The above is merely a brief summary of some of the most common causes of low birth weight. There are myriad other causes, some more common than others. However, more often than not the reasons for low birth weight are unknown.

That was the case with Stephanie Savoie of St. Paul, Minn. Repeated ultrasounds during her pregnancy with her son, Jacob, indicated that he was not gaining weight properly. In spite of a battery of tests, doctors could not determine the reason. When he was born, full term at 39 weeks, he weighed just 4.5 pounds (about 2,000 grams) and spent a week in the NICU.

"There are a lot of misconceptions [about low birth weight]," Savoie says. "When people hear he was only about 4 1/2 pounds when he was born they always ask if he was premature, but he wasn't; he was fully developed."

Preventing Low Birth Weight
Dr. Subramanian notes that sometimes low birth weight simply can't be prevented, but the incidence can be reduced by doing the following:

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