New research has shown that moderate exercise during pregnancy may be beneficial to mothers-to-be and may shrink the risk of adverse health effects, such gestational diabetes.
The study by Norwegian University of Science and Technology has shown while a controlled exercise training programme didn’t result in weight loss in overweight and obese women, it did result in reduced gestational diabetes and blood pressure.
While maternal obesity has always been associated with an increased risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes, researchers were still uncertain whether exercise could reduce gestational weight gain or gestational diabetes.
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In the latest study, researchers assessed whether regular supervised exercise during pregnancy could reduce weight gain in almost 100 obese women who formed part of the study.
The exercise group was offered, in addition to standard maternity care, exercise sessions at hospital three times a week from 12 weeks until delivery. Each session lasted an hour and consisted of jogging, treadmill walking, resistance training for large muscles and pelvic floor muscles, squats and push-ups.
The control group received ordinary maternity care from their midwife, GP or obstetrician. After measuring BMI, body composition, physical activity, skinfold thickness, blood pressure and a variety of blood tests, researchers found no significant differences in weight gain between the exercise group and the control group.
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During late pregnancy, the exercise group was found to have a significantly lower systolic blood pressure compared to the control group. Diastolic blood pressure did not differ between the two groups. High blood pressure in pregnancy is associated with increased risk for pre-eclampsia.
Moreover, only 6% of women had developed diabetes by the end of the pregnancy, compared to 27.3% in the control group.
Writing in the Public Library of Science (Plos) Medicine, lead researcher Kirsti Krohn Garnaes said further studies were needed to evaluate how supervised exercise programmes for obese women could be implemented in the health care system and how to obtain good adherence to such programmes. She acknowledged exercise training could possibly improve weight loss if additional dietary interventions were considered.
In our study, exercise training was the only intervention provided. This makes it easier to assess the isolated effects of exercise on pregnancy outcomes.
Exercise training seemed to be reducing the incidence of diabetes as well as systolic blood pressure in late pregnancy. As exercise adherence is a major challenge in this population, there is a special need to find methods to reduce participant attrition in future studies,she wrote.