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Children whose mothers have type 1 diabetes develop the disease at about half the rate of children whose fathers have it. Inherited genetic risk alone does not explain this long-observed maternal effect, according to a study led by researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz and published in Diabetes Care. The findings point to other possible biological mechanisms that warrant further investigation.
Researchers analyzed 6,942 children in The Environmental Determinants of Diabetes in the Young (TEDDY) study, which followed children at increased genetic risk for type 1 diabetes from infancy into adolescence.
Researchers also examined a long-standing question: Could pregnancy loss help explain why children whose mothers have type 1 diabetes develop the disease less often?
"For decades, this relative maternal protection effect has been consistently observed across studies of living offspring of people with type 1 diabetes. One long-standing but unproven explanation is that this relative protection is an artifact resulting from the selective loss of pregnancies involving the highest-risk offspring," said Randi K. Johnson, Ph.D., MPH, associate professor of biomedical informatics at the CU Anschutz School of Medicine and senior author of the study.
"Advancements in genetics allowed us to comprehensively examine this phenomenon in the largest prospective cohort study of type 1 diabetes in the world."
Researchers compared children's inherited genetic risk for type 1 diabetes using an extended genetic risk score .
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