Exercise During Pregnancy Literature Review

Part 2:

Critical review on the “Effect of Exercise during Pregnancy on the Outcomes of Pregnancy.

Introduction:

The World Health Organisation (WHO) defined pregnancy as the period where a woman bears a growing baby in her womb, which were a moment of bliss and perfection for most mothers [1]. Nonetheless, both the mother and her growing offspring are susceptible for numerous health complications. For this reason, various approach can be used to overcome these risks. One of them is exercising during pregnancy because problems regarding pregnancy and labour are unlikely to occur for active women [2]. There are several researches that proved prenatal exercise will improve maternal and neonatal outcomes [3][4][5][6].

Benefits of exercise during pregnancy for mothers: A research done by Barakat, Pelaez [3] which is “Exercise during pregnancy and gestational diabetes-related adverse effect: a

They suggested that exercise during pregnancy decreased the appearance of high birth weight or macrosomia of babies. The result showed that women who lived actively have lower tendency to deliver macrosomia babies compared to inactive women. After adjustment for maternal age, prepregnancy BMI, education level and parity they got OR of 1.00 for inactive women, 0.74 for active women and 0.61 for very active women which contributed for a very significant p value (p=0.005) [6]. Their result were supported by Tomic, Sporis [10] and Barakat, Pelaez [3] reports. Barakat, Palaez [3] documented a 58 % reduction of macrosomia with p value less than 0.05 (p=0.002) [3] whereas Tomic, Sporis [10] listed lower density of macrosomia in their study with (p=0.048) [10]. The comparisons between the three researches concerning the occurrences of macrosomia with the effect of exercise during pregnancy can be seen in Table 1 whereby all their p values were