African-American women born with a low or very low birth weight may have a higher risk of type 2 diabetes. The results of the study, published in the journal Diabetes Care, can explain to some extent the high prevalence of type 2 diabetes in the low birth weight African American population.
Researchers from Boston University have studied 21,000 women who participated in the "Black Women's Health Study" in the past 16 years. The researchers analyzed their birth weight, current age, family history of diabetes, body mass index, physical activity, and society. Factors such as economic status.
Research results show that women with low birth weight are 13% more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than women with normal birth weight, and women with very low birth weight are 40% more likely to develop this disease. Low birth weight is defined as less than 2.5 kg and very low birth weight less than 1.5 kg. It seems that body size does not play a role in this relationship. This very clear relationship exists between birth weight and diabetes.
Although previous studies have shown that certain characteristics at birth, such as birth weight, have a significant impact on adult health, this is the first large-scale study to prove this effect in African Americans.
"African-American women have an increased risk of type 2 diabetes, and they are more likely to have low birth weight than white women," said Edward Ruiz-Narváez, assistant professor of epidemiology at the Boston University School of Public Health, Southern California. "Our research shows The relationship between birth weight and diabetes is very clear, which emphasizes the importance of further research for this high-risk group."
According to the researchers, there are two main hypotheses that can explain this phenomenon. First of all, it is called the "thrifty phenotype hypothesis", which claims that once the newborn's body senses that it lacks nutrients, it will reorganize itself to absorb more nutrients, which leads to metabolic imbalance and eventually type II diabetes. The second, called the "fetal insulin hypothesis," claims that genes are responsible for impaired insulin secretion and also have an adverse effect on birth weight. Some of these genes have been discovered in recent studies, and this gene supports the latter hypothesis.