Loathsome Link

According to the March of Dimes, the nonprofit organization dedicated to the health of newborn babies and their pregnant mothers, approximately 1.85 million women are diabetic and pregnant. Having diabetes in any condition, pregnant or not, is unfortunate. But based on recent research, women pregnant and with diabetes have an increased risk of giving birth to a baby with one or multiple birth defects.

Now, before going too in-depth, it’s important to note that the link between diabetes and birth defects is marginal at best, so I don’t report this to scare women with diabetes away from having a baby. Nevertheless, it’s important to report because of the prevalence of type II diabetes, which is all too often diagnosed as a result of the poor eating habits that lead to obesity. So I report this with the hope that it might provide more reason to eat healthy, thus minimizing the chances of birth defects should one decide to have a baby.

Lead researcher, Adolf Correa, a doctor and epidemiologist at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center on Birth Defects and Disabilities (wow, that’s a mouthful), says that while the link between birth defects and diabetic mothers has been investigated for some time now, this study is unique in terms of the study’s overall breadth and scope. Unlike previous studies, this study looked at wider range of birth defects, and included women who had gestational diabetes – diabetes that occurs during pregnancy - in addition to those women who had diabetes before becoming pregnant.

They also had a significant sample from which to gather their data. The researchers studied approximately 13,000 infants with one or multiple birth defects and 5,000 infants without birth defects. After collecting information about the mother’s type of diabetes (type I, type II, and whether it was diagnosed before or during pregnancy), as well as their body mass index, they found some striking commonalities. For instance, women with gestational diabetes that had birth defects were fairly limited as far as what kind of birth defect they had. But the likelihood of children getting birth defects was mainly restricted to those women whose BMI was over 25. In short, the heavier they were, the more likely they were to have a child with a birth defect.

On the other hand, mothers who had diabetes before they were pregnant were more likely to give birth to babies with a wide variety of birth defects, including those affecting the heart, brain, spine, gastrointestinal tract, arms and legs.

Now, not all women with diabetes gave birth to babies with a birth defect. Far from it. In fact, 93 percent of the birth defects weren’t associated with maternal diabetes. But that 7 percent, as small as it may seem, is enough to be cautious and aware of.

What is it about diabetes and its link to birth defects? Researchers can’t be sure, but they believe the high blood sugar plays a role, in that it leads to abnormalities in the embryo when the fetus/baby is forming.

Again, this is not to suggest that women with diabetes should not seek to become pregnant. More research needs to be done before anything truly conclusive can be said. But at the very least, this will provide women with diabetes information they might want to know about in the event that they become pregnant. At the same time, with respect to gestational diabetes, it reveals what risks are associated with not eating carefully while pregnant.