Big baby boom: Supersize deliveries have doctors worried (767 hits)
Linda Carroll and Bill Briggs NBC News
A month after delivering a 13-pound, 12-ounce baby girl, Pennsylvania mom Michelle Cessna is reveling in the healthy arrival of her “little blessing” while also scrambling to re-stock her diaper supply.
“We had to exchange all our little diapers for bigger ones,” Cessna, 37, says with a laugh. And baby Addyson shot right past newborn clothes and left the hospital dressed in an outfit meant for a 3-month-old.
Addyson Cessna joins a small but growing club of giant babies making headlines. So far this summer, a German baby girl weighed in at nearly 13 and a half pounds; a California woman had a 13-pound, 10-ounce girl; and just last week, a British mom in Spain gave birth to a 13-pound, 11-ounce daughter. ...
Big babies can pose risk to both the mother and child at birth. They are at risk for shoulder dystocia – which means that the shoulders have grown so big that they can get stuck under the mom’s pubic bone during delivery. Normally the head is the largest part of a baby, but when babies grow so big, the shoulders can become larger than the head.
When babies get stuck, they can end up with fractured bones and the moms can end up with trauma and tearing, Barbieri says.
Along with the risk of a difficult birth, there is the impact on the health of the babies once they are born, says Dr. Irina Burd, an assistant professor of gynecology and obstetrics and neurology and director of the integrated research center for fetal medicine at Johns Hopkins Medicine.
It’s not uncommon for overweight moms to have diabetes or to develop it during pregnancy. And some of the high blood sugar in the mom flows through the placenta to the baby. That, in turn, forces the baby’s pancreas to pump up insulin production, which can leave babies with low blood sugar after they are born, Burd says.
Another problem is that sugar acts like a growth factor, and not all the growth is in sync, says Dr. Hyagriv Simhan, chief of maternal fetal medicine and vice chair for obstetrics at McGee Women’s Hospital at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
..."Overall, there’s been a 15 percent to 25 percent increase in babies weighing 8 pounds, 13 ounces or more (or 4,000 grams, the weight where a baby is considered oversized) in the past two to three decades in developed countries, according to a February report in the medical journal The Lancet..."
