Within country differences of the association between parity and overnutrition in Peruvian women
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Epidemiology, Nutrition, Public Health, Women's Health
- Keywords
- parity, obesity, Women's Health, socioeconomic status
- Copyright
- © 2014 Poterico et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2014. Within country differences of the association between parity and overnutrition in Peruvian women. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e363v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.363v1
Abstract
Background: Evidence denotes a direct association between parity and overnutrition in developing societies. This work aims to assess the relationship between them in Peruvian women, and to investigate whether this association varies by place of residence and socioeconomic status. Methods: We used secondary data from the National Health and Demographic Survey 2011 of Peru (ENDES 2011). Parity was the independent variable, defined as the number of children ever born to a woman. The outcome variable was the body mass index (BMI), with cut-off points of 25-30 kg/m2 and ≥30 kg/m2, for overweight and obesity; respectively. We included other variables due to their potential confounding or modification effect, such as: age, place of residence, wealth index, education, and frequency of watching television. We used a significance level of 5%. Results: We analyzed information of 18262 women. The mean BMI was 25.9 Kg/m2 (SD±4.6). The overall prevalence of obesity and overweight was of 17.2% and 35.0%, respectively. Rural and urban women reported having had 2.5 (95%CI: 2.4-2.6) and 1.5 (95%CI: 1.4-1.5) ever born children, respectively. We found a positive association between parity and overnutrition, and identified the effect modification of place of residence and wealth. The relationship between parity with overweight or obesity was stronger in urban than in rural areas. Women in the bottom and top groups of wealth index showed stronger associations than the other categories of socioeconomic status. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that the more childbirths a woman has, the more likely she is of being overweight or obese. This relationship varies by socioeconomic status and area of residence. Identification of increased BMI in women, especially after the first childbirth, should be evaluated in primary care to establish adequate public health policies to tackle obesity in Peruvian women.
Author Comment
This manuscript has only been submitted to Peer J and not yet submitted to any scientific conference. We would like to start with a PeerJ PrePrint procedure; and then with further observations from colleagues, we could improve our manuscript with the intention to be published in a scientific journal following the peer-reviewed process.
We intended to explore the possible effect of parity on women's body mass index. Having Peru a good maternal health program, it could be useful to describe how partiy could be related to obesity; and how it could vary within country. Our results reinforce the idea that events during each pregnancy and puerperium could contribute to metabolic and lifestyles changes. In our work, we can observe that this relationship seems to be greater in urban settings, showing differences by socioeconomic position; and this fact could be explained by the rapid nutritional transition.
