[Caffeine consumption by pregnant women selected from a Health Care Center in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil].

Purpose: 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.