Demographic profile, methodology, and biochemical correlates during the course of pregnancy.

This five-year prospective, observational study of urban women during their pregnancies was initiated in 1985 with the recruitment of women between the ages of 18 and 35 years in the prenatal clinics of Howard University Hospital and the District of Columbia Department of Human Services. The objective of the investigation was to characterize African American women by nutritional, biochemical, medical, sociocultural, psychological, lifestyle, and environmental parameters which could be used to formulate interventions to improve pregnancy outcomes. The women were all nulliparous, free of diabetes and abnormal hemoglobins, such as sickle cell disease, and no more than 28 weeks pregnant. During the early course of the study, it was apparent that 96% of the low income clinic patients had delivered infants of normal birth weight (> or = 2500 g), P = 0.001. Recruitment was then initiated at the District of Columbia General Hospital; women 16 and 17 years of age and at any gestational stage were included. This paper is the first in the series on African American women and their pregnancies. It will present the demographic characteristics of this regular cohort of 443 women who delivered live infants, the methodology used for biochemical, dietary, and psychosocial data sets, the mean values for infant gestational age, head circumference, body length, and birth weight from singleton births, and correlates of the mean values of biochemical variables for three trimesters of pregnancy with other biochemical parameters and those pregnancy outcomes.