In one of the newest revealing studies on pediatric health, it's discovered that children who are born on overweight or obese mothers are more likely to develop type 1 diabetes by 33%.
A group of researchers from Sweden decided to determine whether the weight of the mother has some negative effect on the health of their children, and they discovered that being obese while pregnant may lead to a chronic lifetime condition known as type 1 diabetes.
Unlike type 2 diabetes, which usually occurs due to insulin resistance and poor lifestyle factors, type 1 diabetes, also known as juvenile diabetes, means the body is not capable of producing insulin at all so the person cannot control sugar levels in the blood. High sugar can lead to nerve damage, blindness, and kidney damage, among others.
During the study, the researchers chose over 1 million Swedish children whose health was then tracked for more than 10 years starting in 1992. Upon analyses of the data, they learned that the risk of developing type 1 diabetes increased by 33% for children whose parents were obese. The risk remained as high even if the mother wasn't diagnosed with diabetes at any point before or during the pregnancy.
Meanwhile, the risk didn't increase if the mother was obese and diabetic. The likelihood of developing type 1 diabetes was high if the mother was overweight or obese during the first trimester of her pregnancy.
But this is not all. The same research suggests that it's not only the mothers who could determine the risk of type 1 diabetes. Even fathers could. In fact, if the child has a diabetic father, the risk of having juvenile diabetes is at least 5 times higher than those whose fathers are not diagnosed with the disorder.
The researchers then believed that by treating or preventing obesity of women especially those in their child-bearing age may reduce the prevalence of type 1 diabetes among children.
