Tag : Gestational

Liege (Belgium): Women of South Asian origin may be more likely to experience gestational diabetes due to the same complex genetics that increases their chance of acquiring type 2 diabetes, according to a study. The findings of the study were published in eLife. The discovery may lead to new ways to identify women who would benefit from interventions to prevent diabetes during pregnancy. People of South Asian descent have an elevated risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Women in this group are also twice as likely to develop a condition called gestational diabetes during pregnancy than women of European descent. But why South Asians are at an increased risk of these two conditions is not currently clear. "Only a handful of studies have looked at how genetic and environmental factors interact in gestational diabetes in South Asian women," says lead author Amel Lamri, a research associate at McMaster University and Population Health Research Institute (PHRI) in Ontario, Canada. "None have looked at how the genes associated with type 2 diabetes may interact with environmental factors to contribute to gestational diabetes in South Asian women." To close this gap, Lamri and colleagues assessed the relationship between genes associated with type 2 diabetes, environmental factors, and gestational diabetes. They examined whether having genetic signatures linked with type 2 diabetes risk is also connected with gestational diabetes in 837 and 4,372 South Asian women who participated in the SouTh Asian BiRth CohorT (START) study, and the Born in Bradford (BiB) study respectively. The team measured the genetic risk of type 2 diabetes using a polygenic risk score, which estimates the hereditary risk of an individual developing a disease based ...