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Underweight, pregnant women who are African American have a higher pre-term birthrate than White women which also puts them at greater risk for vaginal inflammation.
 
Researchers say that being underweight [indicative of a low Body Mass Index (BMI)] during pregnancy has been known to increase the risk of premature risk for all minorities but the risk is twice as high for African American women.
 
"These data suggest that there are racial differences in how nutritional status, as represented by BMI, might influence...the risk of spontaneous preterm birth," Drs. Hyagriv N. Simhan and Lisa M. Bodnar of the University of Pittsburgh write in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
 
BMI is the relationship between body, weight and height.  20 and 25 are normal values for women. Women with lower values are underweight and anything over these normal values are considered overweight or obese.
 
The research conducted by Bodnar and Simhan showed that women with a low BMI were 40 to 90 percent more likely to have a pre-term birth than women with a normal BMI. The research also showed that a low BMI also increased the risk for vaginal inflammation, a finding not shown in other minorities
 
Bodnar and Simhan said the study was too small to show the effects of low BMI, vaginal inflammation across an array of ethnic groups but they feel their research does shed light on the situation.
 
"Still, we speculate that our findings of ethnic differences in the contributions of both BMI to preterm birth and BMI to the vaginal inflammatory milieu may explain, in part, the racial disparity in preterm birth," says Bodnar and Simhan.

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