Inadequate prenatal nutrition linked to diabetes risk, says study

• Lack of adequate prenatal nutrition increases the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, researchers at Joslin Diabetes Center have found.
• A study on mice has indicated that poor prenatal nutrition causes impairment in the activity of the pancreas later in life, hampering the production of insulin according to the levels of blood glucose.
• The study, which was published in the March edition of Diabetes, has provided some reasons for the previous links found between low birth weight and diabetes.
• Joslin Medical Center's Dr Mary-Elizabeth Patti, who is also the assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, headed the research.
• "The bottom line is that if you don't have delivery of enough nutrients from the mother to the baby, the baby's pancreatic cells will be programmed abnormally," she said adding that the effect doesn't show up until adolescence or adulthood.
• Under the study, researchers separated pregnant mice into two groups, with those in one group, called the control group, eating as much as they wanted throughout the pregnancy.
• Towards the completion of six months, the low birth weight babies started showing very high blood glucose levels, as much as that of a person with full-blown diabetes.
• The pancreas size and numbers of pancreatic beta cells, which produce insulin, remained the same in both groups.
• Dr Rebecca Anne Simmons, assistant professor (pediatrics), University of Pennsylvania, felt that the nutrition that the undernourished pregnant mice received was far less than what is seen in humans.
• According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the incidence of low weight babies in the United States has gone up by 12 per cent between 1980 and 2000 among babies weighing 2500 gm, and 24 per cent in babies weighing 1500 gm or less.