Minorities’ Diabetes Risk in Pregnancy Shown
The first federal study of births complicated by diabetes shows that minorities are at the highest risk because they do not get prenatal care to detect and control the disease, health officials reported Thursday.
“This is a very clear case of a disease where we have clear risks and clear interventions that can prevent serious complications,” said Robert German of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Women must get early and continuous prenatal care.”
Doctors knew that African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans and American Indians get diabetes more often than whites. For example, the rate of diabetes in 1989 was 25.2 cases per 1,000 white women compared with 43.4 cases among black women. Doctors also suspected that minorities were at further risk from diabetes during pregnancy because they received less prenatal care, but they had never been able to track that, German said.
Then, in 1989, new U.S. birth certificates documented maternal diabetes as well as prenatal care for the first time. The CDC studied 3.6 million birth certificates issued that year. It found that for every 10,000 live births, 211 new mothers had diabetes.
The diabetes rate was highest among minorities, who also were likely to have had less prenatal care, the study found. The rate for white women was 207.4, compared with 218.2 for African-Americans, 225.6 for Latinos, 221.2 for Asian-Americans and 448.1 for American Indians.
The study does not present a true picture of diabetes during pregnancy because it tracked only live births, not pregnancies that ended in miscarriage or abortion, the CDC reported. But it is “very disturbing . . . because diabetes can be brought under control with proper prenatal care,” German said.
Diabetes can cause kidney failure, blindness and death. During pregnancy, it causes premature delivery, birth defects or even the baby’s death.
Diet, exercise and insulin injections control diabetes effectively if begun early, German said.
Some women have chronic diabetes; others develop the gestation type, which develops during pregnancy and usually disappears after birth.
