Study shows rapid surge in diabetic pregnancies

A large study has found that more American women are giving birth with diabetes. Researchers at the Kaiser Permanente Department of Research & Evaluation in Pasadena, California suggest that the number of women with diabetes giving birth more than doubled recently, raising health concerns for both mothers-to-be and babies.

According to the Kaiser Permanente study published in the May issue of Diabetes Care, rate of women who had diabetes before they became pregnant has doubled to nearly 2% from 1999 to 2005.

And the number of diabetic teenagers, 13 to 19 year-olds, giving birth grew five fold during the same period. It swelled from about 1 per 1,000 pregnancies to 5.5 per 1,000 during the seven-year period, according to the study, the largest ever to examine the trends in both pre-pregnancy type 1 and type 2 diabetes (the most common form of the disease and gestational diabetes in teens and adult women from a large racially and ethnically diverse population.

Gestational diabetes develops during pregnancy and then generally disappears after the delivery.

"More young women are entering their reproductive years with diabetes, in part due to the fact that our society has become more overweight and obese," said lead author Jean M. Lawrence, ScD, MPH, MSSA, a research scientist at Kaiser Permanente's Department of Research & Evaluation.

To reach their findings, Lawrence and her colleagues studied 175,249 women and teens who had given birth in 11 Southern California Kaiser hospitals between 1999 and 2005.

After analyzing the data the researchers’ team discovered a rapid increase in the number of diabetic women giving birth during the seven-year period, from 245 women in 1999 to 537 in 2005.

That translates to a rate that surged from 8 per 1,000 pregnancies to 18 per 1,000 and this surge, the researchers suspect, can be attributed to women or teenage girls who had gained weight and developed type 2 diabetes, a serious and debilitating disease that becomes progressively more common with age and obesity.

"While we currently don't know how to prevent type 1 diabetes, the steps to reducing risk of type 2 diabetes must start before childbearing years: healthy eating, active living and maintaining a healthy weight. These habits should begin in childhood and continue through adulthood."

Interestingly, Blacks, Asians and Hispanics were more likely to have diabetes before pregnancy than whites.

The findings are of concern because diabetes increases risk of miscarriage and birth defects. Foetus exposed to high blood sugar levels can have serious birth defects, including heart problems.