Tehran University Medical Journal

Pregnancy as a natural event leads to changes in various aspects of physiology, psychology, and social life. The adoption of a health promoting lifestyle is an important strategy for achieving the desired outcomes of pregnancy and is important on the future health of mother and child. The aim of this study was to assess the various aspects of health promotion behaviors during pregnancy. The data was obtained with advanced search in the Iranmedex, Magiran, Scientific Information Database (SID), IranDoc, PubMed, Google Scholar, Web of Science and Scopus databases. Articles containing full text were collected using the proper keywords for Persian articles and their equivalent in Mesh included “Health promotion" OR "Behavior health "OR “Health Promoting Lifestyle” AND pregnancy for English articles with a time limitation of 2010 to 2017. At first 3247 articles obtained after reviewing and evaluation of the references, 4 Persian and 25 English articles with observational and qualitative design were included. A review of studies showed that finding a way to pass pregnancy safely is the most important concern for mothers. Pregnant women do some actions to reach favorable outcomes and they have a high incentive to adopt health behaviors during pregnancy due to fear of fetal health, but there is some obstacle to adopt health behaviors including individual factors like that lack of time and inadequate information about pregnancy or health-related functions and social factors including health system problems and cultural factors. In addition age, level of education, individual’s beliefs and factors associated with pregnancy such as high-risk pregnancy and environmental factors such as social support and health system performance play an important role in the adoption of health behaviors. In order to increase the potential of pregnant women to adopt healthy behaviors, changing the health system approach and paying attention to social determinants of health, in order to carry out the necessary interventions, it is recommended to conduct qualitative studies and appropriate design for deep study of the subject in the cultural background.