Current Pediatric Research

Background: Anaemia in pregnancy is a major risk factor for poor neonatal outcomes such as low birth weight, prematurity, small for gestational age babies. The present study aimed at evaluating the association between maternal haemoglobin and outcome in the parameters of birth weight and length in term neonates.

Objectives: To find out the association of maternal haemoglobin with the birth weight and crown heel length of the term neonate.

Methods: It was an observational study including 350 term neonates over a period of 6 months carried out at PDMMC, Amravati. The data was collected and bio statistically analysed to obtain the results.

Results: It was observed that before delivery, 51% and 9.7% mothers had normal and high haemoglobin levels respectively. The remaining were identified as anaemic with 20.9% mild, 17.7% moderate and 0.6% severe anaemia. At the 10% level of significance, the results revealed a significant relationship of maternal haemoglobin with neonatal birth weight. It was found that high haemoglobin levels did not affect the birth weight of the baby. However, we did not find any significant association of maternal haemoglobin with the length of the neonate. The observations recorded a remarkable impact on the length of the females as compared to males born to anaemic mothers.

Conclusion: Our study concluded that mothers with mild, moderate and severe anaemia gave birth to low birth weight neonates. But this relationship is insignificant in association with the length of the neonate.

Author(s): Sanket Pande*, Naresh Tayde, Sarah Pradip Palmer

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