A new study out of Canada suggests that children whose mothers were diagnosed with gestational diabetes when they were in utero are twice as likely to have language delays in childhood. The researchers, led by Ginette Dionne, a psychology professor at Laval University in Quebec, compared 221 children born to diabetic mothers with 2,612 whose mothers were not diabetic during pregnancy; while 13% of the children in the control group evinced some language delay, 26% of the diabetic mothers' children did. The study controlled for such factors as smoking, birth weight, and maternal age and educational level.
What does this give us, besides another reason for women who get gestational diabetes to feel guilty? Dr. Dionne says she hopes that further studies could demonstrate the benefits of early language intervention for such children, to help close the gap.
