Anne Lærke Spangmose and colleagues from Copenhagen University Hospital, Denmark obtained data from Danish registers and also on test scores in math for grades three and six, and reading for grades two, four, six and eight. The team included 622,073 children between 6-18 years old attending public schools over a seven-year period.
Impact of Paternal Diabetes on Children’s Cognition
There were 2,144 children with mothers with type 1 diabetes, 3,474 children with fathers with type 1 diabetes, and 616,455 children from the background population. Children of mothers and fathers with type 1 diabetes had mean scores of 54.2 and 54.4 respectively, compared with mean scores of 56.4 in children from the background population.
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The team acknowledge that having a parent suffering from a serious chronic disease like diabetes could cause stress and be detrimental to a child’s school performance. However this study suggests a different explanation for previously observed adverse effects of maternal type 1 diabetes during pregnancy on children’s cognitive development.
Spangmose adds, “Lower test scores in the offspring of mothers with type 1 diabetes appear to reflect a negative association of having a parent with type 1 diabetes rather than a specific adverse effect of maternal type 1 diabetes during pregnancy on the fetus. Our recent large Danish cohort study, including 622,073 children, has shown this.”
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Source: Eurekalert
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