International journal of obesity : journal of the International Association for the Study of Obesity
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Review Meta Analysis
The impact of cesarean section on offspring overweight and obesity: a systematic review and meta-analysis.
Studies have reported inconsistent results concerning the association of cesarean section with offspring obesity. We performed a systematic review and meta-analysis to examine whether cesarean section increases the risk of later overweight and obesity. Pubmed, Embase and Web of Science were searched using different combinations of two groups of keywords: 'cesarean' and 'overweight/obesity'. ⋯ The ORs for children, adolescents and adults all tended to be lower for high-quality studies compared with medium-quality studies. Our results indicated that cesarean section was moderately associated with offspring overweight and obesity. This finding has public health implications, given the increase in cesarean births in many countries.