CSBJ Daily

Diabetes before motherhood more than doubled during the past six years among teenage and adult women, according to a Kaiser Permanente study published in the May issue of Diabetes Care.

This is the largest study to examine the trends in both pre-pregnancy type 1 and type 2 diabetes and gestational diabetes in teenagers and adult women from a large racially and ethnically diverse population.

Gestational diabetes develops during pregnancy then usually disappears after the baby is born. Pre-pregnancy type 1 and type 2 diabetes are more dangerous and harder to treat than gestational diabetes and carry more risks to mother and baby.

Kaiser Permanente’s Department of Research & Evaluation in Pasadena looked at 175,249 women who gave birth in 11 Kaiser Permanente hospitals in Southern California between 1999 and 2005. Researchers found that there were twice as many births to women with diabetes in 2005 as there were in 1999. Fifty-two percent of the women in the study were Hispanic, 26 percent were white, 11 percent were Asian/Pacific Islanders and 10 percent were African-American.