Late neonatal ingestion of breast milk and the duration of breast feeding do not appear to independently influence the risk of overweight or impaired glucose tolerance in the children of diabetic mothers, new research shows. However, breast-feeding during the first week of life may have a more important influence.

The offspring of diabetic mothers have an increased risk of developing these two conditions, principal investigator Dr. Andreas Plagemann and colleagues from Charite-University Medicine Berlin, Germany, note in the June issue of Diabetes Care. “Recently, we observed that early neonatal ingestion of breast milk from diabetic mothers may dose-dependently increase the risk of overweight in childhood.”

To investigate, the researchers evaluated 112 children of diabetic mothers who were breast-fed. Mean age at follow-up was 2.1 years.

“Exclusive breast-feeding was associated with increased childhood relative body weight (p = 0.011),” the investigators report. “Breast-fed offspring of diabetic mothers had an increased risk of overweight (odds ratio 1.98).”

A positive relation was observed between breast-feeding duration and childhood relative body weight (p = 0.004). Duration of breast-feeding was also positively related to 120-min blood glucose during oral glucose tolerance test (p = 0.022).

However, all of the associations with late neonatal breast-feeding and its duration were eliminated after adjusting for the breast milk volume ingested during the early neonatal period (1st week of life).

Dr. Plagemann’s group hypothesizes that the first week after birth is a “critical period, when exposure to diabetic breast milk may have a negative long-term influence on risk of overweight and Diabetes in offspring of diabetic mothers. This might have important practical consequences.”

Diabetes Care 2005;28:1457-1462.