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Overweight and obese pre-pregnancy BMI is associated with higher hospital costs of childbirth in England

Solmi, F; Morris, S; (2018) Overweight and obese pre-pregnancy BMI is associated with higher hospital costs of childbirth in England. BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth , 18 , Article 253. 10.1186/s12884-018-1893-z. Green open access

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Abstract

Background: Women who have an overweight or obese BMI are more likely to experience pregnancy complications. However, little is known on the cost of childbirth in this group and no studies have been undertaken in England to date. The aim of this paper is therefore to investigate whether women with overweight and obese pre-pregnancy body mass index (BMI) incur higher average hospital costs of childbirth. Methods: We employed data from 7564 women in the first wave of data collection of the Millennium Cohort Study. Using interval regression, we investigated the association between hospital costs of childbirth and pre-pregnancy BMI, fitting four models, progressively adjusting for additional potential confounders and mediators. Model 1 was a univariate model; model 2 adjusted for maternal age, education, marital status, ethnicity, income, and region; model 3 additionally included number of previous children, number of babies delivered, whether birth was at term, and type of delivery; model 4 also included length of hospital stay. Results: Childbirth costs incurred by women who were overweight, obese class I and obese class II and III were £22, £82 and £126 higher than those incurred by women whose BMI was in the normal range (p ≤ 0.05). Delivery method, pre-term delivery, and length of hospital stay accounted for the observed difference. Conclusions: Women with elevated pre-pregnancy BMI make greater use of services resulting in higher hospital costs. Interventions promoting healthy BMI in pre-pregnancy among women of child-bearing age have the potential to reduce pregnancy complications and be cost-effective.

Type: Article
Title: Overweight and obese pre-pregnancy BMI is associated with higher hospital costs of childbirth in England
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1186/s12884-018-1893-z
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12884-018-1893-z
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © The Author(s). 2018 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.
Keywords: Pregnancy, Hospital costs, Obesity, Pre-pregnancy BMI, Pregnancy complications, Length of stay
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Division of Psychiatry
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > Institute of Epidemiology and Health
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > Institute of Epidemiology and Health > Applied Health Research
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10050076
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