The Association of Maternal Obesity and Race with Pregnancy Weight Gain and Small for Gestational Age Infant Birth: The Effect of Prenatal Care

Objective: To examine the association of maternal obesity, race/ethnicity, and prenatal care on high gestational weight gain (GWG) and small for gestational age (SGA) infant birth. Methods: This was a retrospective cohort study of births included in the PRAMS Phase 8 dataset (2016-2017). The study population was 53,893 non-diabetic women with a singleton in-hospital birth between 37 and 42 weeks gestational age. Results: Only obese non-Hispanic white and Hispanic women showed a consistent decrease in adjusted odds of high GWG as prenatal care visit category increased. Only non-Hispanic white women showed a lower increase in adjusted odds of an SGA infant birth with more compared to intermediate prenatal care. Conclusions: The effectiveness of prenatal care in reducing high GWG varies by race for women with a BMI outside a healthy range. More prenatal care did not reduce SGA infant births amongst overweight or obese women. Policy implications: Interventions to improve prenatal care delivery for overweight or obese women should consider race

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead