Association Between Maternal Diabetes and Neurodevelopmental Disorders in Children

A new analysis entitled, “Association between maternal diabetes and neurodevelopmental outcomes in children: a systematic review and meta-analysis of 202 observational studies comprising 56·1 million pregnancies,” published in The Lancet found that in of over 200 studies children born to mothers with diabetes face significantly higher risks of developing a range of neurodevelopmental disorders.

The meta-analysis, which included more than 56 million mother–child pairs, concluded that maternal diabetes is "associated with increased risks of all types of neurodevelopmental disorders as well as lower intelligence and psychomotor scores."

Researchers found that children exposed to maternal diabetes had elevated risks of conditions such as autism spectrum disorder (25% higher), ADHD (30% higher), and intellectual disability (32% higher), compared to children of non-diabetic mothers.

The study also revealed that the risk was greater for children of women with pre-gestational diabetes than those with gestational diabetes, with researchers noting a stronger link to neurodevelopmental challenges in the former group: “Maternal pre-gestational diabetes was more strongly associated with the risk of most neurodevelopmental disorders… than gestational diabetes.”

The study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, call for further research to establish causality and to better understand how different types of diabetes impact childhood development.