Prenatal diabetes exposure has consequences: study

Young adults who were exposed to diabetes in the womb appear to be at increased risk for developing diabetes at an early age.

In the SEARCH for Diabetes in Youth Study - a survey of ethnically diverse people diagnosed with diabetes before age 20 years - exposure to diabetes during gestation was associated with an earlier age at diagnosis of type 2 diabetes in offspring.

As rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes increase, more young women will be exposing their unborn children to high blood sugar levels, Dr. David J. Pettitt from the Sansum Diabetes Research Institute, Santa Barbara, California and colleagues note in a report in the journal Diabetes Care this month.

"Children exposed at this early stage of life to abnormal nutrients from their diabetic mothers need to be followed carefully," the study team emphasizes, and known risk factors - such as obesity, high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels - "need early treatment."

Among 331 young people in the SEARCH study with type 2 diabetes, Pettitt's team found that type 2 diabetes was diagnosed 1.68 years earlier among the 174 young people exposed to diabetes in the womb than among those whose mothers' diabetes was not diagnosed until after the young person's birth.

These findings, they say, suggest that exposing the fetus to diabetes during gestation "predisposes to an earlier onset of type 2 diabetes."

"This study helps explain why other studies have found higher age-specific rates of type 2 diabetes among offspring of women with diabetes," Pettitt and colleagues note.

SOURCE: Diabetes Care, November 2008.