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Written By: Editorial Team | Published : October 26, 2014 4:31 PM IST
Women who developed gestational diabetes and were overweight before pregnancy were at a higher risk of begetting daughters who became obese later in childhood, said a research.
This is the first study of this kind directly linking maternal hyperglycemia (high blood glucose) to overweight offspring.
'Glucose levels during pregnancy, particularly gestational diabetes, were associated with the girls being overweight, and this association was much stronger if the mother was also overweight before pregnancy,' said Ai Kubo, epidemiologist at the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research in Oakland, California in the uS.
The study is based on long-term research that included a multi-ethnic cohort of 421 girls and their mothers.
The girls were followed from 2005 to 2011, with annual clinic visits to measure each girl's height, weight, body fat, abdominal obesity, and other parameters, pointed out the study.
Pregnant women in the Kaiser Permanente system were asked to take glucose tolerance tests during gestational weeks 24 to 28.
Twenty-seven mothers in the study had gestational diabetes, found the study.
If a girl's mother had gestational diabetes, the former's risk of having a body mass index at or above the 85th percentile was 3.5 times higher than that of girls whose mothers did not have gestational diabetes, said the authors.
In case her mother was also overweight and had gestational diabetes, the risk of being overweight was about 5.5 times higher, found the research.
Behaviour modifications in women to reduce weight gain and improve lifestyle before and during pregnancy may also help reduce the risk of obesity in their offspring, concluded Kubo.
The study appeared in the journal Diabetes Care.
What is obesity?
Obesity refers to increased body fat but it is not same as being overweight. A person who is overweight need not be obese but a person who is obese is overweight. Overweight is the term used for a person who weighs more. The weight can be muscle weight, bone weight or fat weight. But a person is said to be obese when he/she consumes more number of calories than the number of calories used by the body. If your Body Mass Index or BMI (calculated by dividing height by weight) is more than 30, then you are obese. Obesity is becoming a global epidemic not only in developed nations but also in developing nations like India. Obesity is linked to a host of lifestyle disorders like diabetes, heart diseases, hypertension and stroke. Easy availability of sugars and fats, messing with our body clocks and an increased sedentary lifestyle are responsible for obesity. Being overweight and obesity are the fifth leading risk for global deaths with at least 2.8 million adults dying each year due to them. In this section, you ll find articles like the need to control obesity, hazards of being obese, childhood obesity etc. You can also look for ways to fight obesity, for ex: exercises for obese people, bariatric surgery,possibility of eating obesity without healthy diet and exercise, healthy food option to lose weight quickly.
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