Babies over 4 kilos at birth

If your child is born overweight, the pediatrician should rule out that the baby has any pathology or possible diabetes during pregnancy. If all the tests are normal and do not present any alarming data, remember that your child can be a healthy child even if it is bigger or smaller in relation to the percentiles of weight and height, up to two years of age.

Overweight at birth and risk of diseases in the baby

Currently, they qualify as overweight, or macrosomic, babies, to newborns who exceed 4 kilos at birth. But this does not mean that these children have health problems as a result. If they do not have any stigma and the blood glucose tests in their first hours of life are negative, they are, without more, big children, who will have their development like any other.

When a newborn is above four kilos, the pediatrician performs a series of tests in the following hours at birth to rule out possible pathologies.

The reasons for its size They may be related to the height of the parents, a possible diabetes of the mother during pregnancy, or heart disease, which will have already been diagnosed intrauterine by ultrasound during pregnancy.

A baby can make a hypoglycemia (low blood glucose levels) in the first hours of life, which is usually resolved by breastfeeding the child at birth, or with a dose of glucose. If between 12 and 24 hours has not corrected this hypoglycemia, the specialist will be the one to determine another series of tests that clarify this lowering of glucose.

Risks of overweight at birth in adulthood

In another sense, recent research suggests that babies born with excess weight are at greater risk of suffering from various types of cancer in adulthood. It has also been found that there is a close relationship between the excessive birth weight of girls and a higher incidence of breast cancer before reaching 50 years of age.

In contrast, children with low birth weight are more at risk of heart disease and diabetes in adulthood. Reasons for their few kilos may be the fact of being premature or by a delay in the rate of intrauterine growth. Most low birth weight children reach the growth of other babies their age, approximately between 18 weeks and 24 months. Also, the weight of the newborn influences the constitution of the mother, that is, her height and weight before pregnancy.