[Caffeine consumption by pregnant women selected from a Health Care Center in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil].
OBJECTIVE
to determine caffeine consumption in pregnant women and to evaluate its association with demographic, socioeconomic, reproductive, lifestyle and maternal nutritional status.


METHODS
it is a cross-sectional study performed between 2005 and 2007. The present analysis refers to the period among the 8th and 13th gestational week and included 255 pregnant women from 18 to 40 years, clients of a municipal health center in Rio de Janeiro. The outcome variable was caffeine consumption, quantified by a semi-quantitative food frequency questionnaire, which count with a list containing 81 items and eight options of consumption frequencies; besides it being previously validated in a sample of employees of the State University of Rio de Janeiro. The caffeine intake was quantified starting from the consumption of: powdered chocolate, chocolate bar or chocolate, soft drink, coffee and mate tea. The statistical analysis was performed by means of fitting a multivariate linear regression.


RESULTS
the median and the mean caffeine consumption were, respectively, 97.5 and 121.1 mg (standard deviation, sd = 128.4). The high caffeine consumption (> 300 mg/day) was observed in 8.3% of pregnant women. It was observed in the multivariate model that women with earlier menarche (beta = -0.15), with more household partners (b = 0.17) and who didn't make use of medicines (beta = -0.24) presented larger tendency to high caffeine consumption association that was statistically significant (p <0.05).


CONCLUSIONS
the caffeine consumption for most of the pregnant women was inferior to the limit of 300 mg/day as committed in other studies. Tendency was observed toward higher consumption of caffeine in pregnant women with earlier menarche, with more household partners and who didn't make use of medicines.
Pacheco
Alice Helena de Resende Nóra
AH
Instituto de Nutrição Josué de Castro, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro (RJ), Brasil. alicehelena@ufrj.br
Araujo
Daniele Marano Rocha
DM
Lacerda
Elisa Maria de Aquino
EM
Kac
Gilberto
G
D000328:Adult; D001938:Brazil; D002110:Caffeine; D003069:Coffee; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D004326:Drinking; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008019:Life Style; D009752:Nutritional Status; D011247:Pregnancy; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors; D014505:Urban Population; D055815:Young Adult
D003069:Coffee; D002110:Caffeine