Children born to women who had gestational diabetes have a substantially higher likelihood of developing Type 2 diabetes as teenagers, a new study shows.
The researchers followed 255 obese adolescents over the course of roughly three years, about one in five of whom had been exposed to gestational diabetes in the womb.
At the start of the study, published in the journal Diabetologia, tests showed that all of the adolescents had normal glucose tolerance. But three years later, teenagers born to mothers with gestational diabetes were six times more likely to have progressed to prediabetes or diabetes themselves than those born to mothers without the condition.
Children exposed to gestational diabetes already had signs of reduced function in the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas at the study’s start, said Dr. Sonia Caprio, a study author and professor of pediatric endocrinology at Yale. She suspects there may be environmental factors at play in the first few years of life, or unique epigenetic changes in the womb that impair beta cell function.
The findings are particularly concerning because gestational diabetes is on the rise in the United States.
“We need to reduce the onset of gestational diabetes,” Dr. Caprio said. “There is a lot of focus on trying to prevent women from gaining a lot of weight during pregnancy. Not only could it prevent the onset of diabetes in the woman, but in the child as well.”