The effectiveness of anthropometric indicators in the nutritional diagnosis of well-nourished and undernourished pregnant women

The objective was to evaluate the effectiveness of the indicators prepregnancy weight and prepregnancy body mass index in the categorization of the nutritional state of the pregnant woman. The study group was formed by 109 pregnant women. They were evaluated in the first trimester of the pregnancy, at the "Centro de Atención Nutricional Infantil Antímano". In each one of them the nutritional state was classified according to three criteria: integral nutritional diagnosis, prepregnancy weight and prepregnancy body mass index. For the evaluation of the effectiveness of the diagnostic criteria, the other two approaches were compared with the integral nutritional diagnosis. The analysis of the frequency, sensibility, specificity and predictive values were applied. The integral nutritional diagnosis showed: 75.2% (n = 82) well-nourished and 14.8% (n = 27) undernourished. The sensibility of the prepregnancy weight was 0.93 and of the prepregnancy body mass index was 0.52, with a positive predictive value of 0.60 and 0.82 respectively. The specificity of the first indicator was 0.79 and of the second was 0.96, with negative predictive value of 0.97 and 0.86 respectively. The pregnancy weight demonstrated to be effective to diagnosis undernourished women.