Mum's 'gestational diabetes' can predict diabetes risk in dad

As per a new study by an Indian doctor, gestational diabetes, a type of diabetes that occurs during pregnancy, can predict future diabetes in fathers too.

Kaberi Dasgupta of the McGill University said that they observed that the incident of diabetes was 33 percent greater in men whose partner has gestational diabetes compared with men whose partners did not have gestational diabetes.

The researchers hypothesized that gestational diabetes in mothers signals a possible diabetes incidence in fathers.

In the study, the researchers randomly selected singleton live births from 1990 to 2007 with a positive diagnosis for gestational diabetes in mothers and matched controls without gestational diabetes from health administrative, birth and death registry data from the province of Quebec.

They further identified fathers with type 2 diabetes from the time of the mother's post-delivery discharge from the hospital to the father's departure from Quebec, death or end of the study period.

An Overall of 70,890 fathers was evaluated (half with partners with gestational diabetes).

Dasgupta said that their analysis suggested that couples shared risk partly because of their shared social and cultural environment, which might contribute to health behaviours and attitudes.

She added that their data also suggested that gestational diabetes could be leveraged as a tool to enhance diabetes detection and prevention in fathers.

The study is published in the journal Diabetes Care.