BY MADELINE KENNEDY Fri Mar 27, 2015 10:50am EDT (Reuters Health) – - Mothers who are overweight before pregnancy and those who gain too much while pregnant are more likely to have obese seven-year-olds, researchers say. Their study, conducted from 1998 to 2013, focused on African-American and Dominican mothers from low-income neighborhoods in New York City. “Because there is limited evidence of the long-term effects of pregnancy weight gain on childhood health outcomes in low-income urban populations, we sought to evaluate how pregnancy weight gain was related to childhood body size and obesity,” said lead author Elizabeth Widen at the Institute of Human Nutrition at Columbia University. Andrea Deierlein of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital noted in an email that there are “many risks associated with childhood obesity - obese children are more likely to be obese throughout adolescence and adulthood.” Deierlein, who was not involved in the study, noted that in adulthood, the risks associated with obesity include type 2 diabetes, hypertension and sleep disturbances. Past research has also shown that overweight mothers are more likely to give birth to larger than normal babies, and those babies are at high risk of growing up to be obese. The U.S.