The effect of COVID-19 during pregnancy on birth weight at term

Abstract

In this study, it was aimed to investigate COVID-19 influence on fetal growth during any period of pregnancy, based on birth weight. This single center controlled retrospective cohort study was conducted at a tertiary hospital obstetrics clinic between May 2020 and April 2022. Among those who met the inclusion criteria, 239 who had COVID-19 during pregnancy were included in the case group, and 239 who did not were included in the control group. Maternal age, trimester with COVID-19 and birth information including week of birth, gender of the child, and mode of birth were recorded. Birth weights were evaluated through Olsen Fetal Growth Curves and analyzed according to percentiles. The number of infants with low birth weight (less than 10th percentile) was 14 (5.9%) in the case group and 2 (0.9%) in the control group (p=0.002). No statistically significant difference was detected between the groups in terms of high birth weight (over the 90th percentile) (p=0.823). The mean maternal age of high birth weight newborns was higher than others, in the case group (35.0±5.0 versus 29.7±5.4, p=0.002). Logistic regression analysis showed that having had COVID-19 predicted low birth weight (OR 7.37 [1.66-32.81]). In this study, it was found that COVID-19 negatively affected birth weight regardless of the trimester of pregnancy. This highlights the need to investigate the intrauterine effects of COVID-19.

Keywords

• Birth weight
• COVID-19
• intrauterine growth retardation
• newborn
• pregnancy.

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