Female fetuses exposed to tobacco smoke may have increased diabetes risk in middle age
2015-03-07
(Press-News.org) San Diego, CA-- A fetus exposed to tobacco smoke may be at increased risk for diabetes in adulthood, a new study of adult daughters finds. The results will be presented in a poster Saturday, March 7, at ENDO 2015, the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society in San Diego.
Women whose parents smoked during pregnancy had increased risk of diabetes mellitus independent of known risk factors, adding to the evidence that prenatal environmental chemical exposures can contribute to adult diabetes mellitus.
"From a public health perspective, reduced fetal environmental tobacco smoke exposure appears to be an important modifiable risk factor for diabetes mellitus in offspring," said lead study author Michele La Merrill, MPH, PhD, assistant professor of in the Department of Environmental Toxicology at the University of California, Davis.
"Medical doctors should consider advising pregnant smokers that emerging research suggests that tobacco smoking cessation in the home may benefit offspring by reducing their risk of developing diabetes mellitus independent of the effects of adult body mass index or birth weight on diabetes risk," she added.
Dr. La Merrill and her colleagues studied 1,801 diabetic daughters between the ages of 44 and 54 years who were born between 1959 and 1967 in the Child Health and Development Studies pregnancy cohort in California, a study designed to examine the associations between prenatal exposures and health outcomes in the parents and offspring. The mothers had reported parental tobacco smoking during an early pregnancy interview, and the daughters developed diabetes mellitus.
The researchers had data on parental tobacco smoking during pregnancy, race, occupation, report of parental diabetes and self-report of body weight. They interviewed the daughters by phone, in-home visits and blood tests for glycated hemoglobin (hemoblogin A1c) to learn how well their diabetes was being controlled.
Prenatal smoking by the mothers had a stronger association with the daughters' diabetes mellitus risk than prenatal smoking by the fathers, and this association remained after adjusting for parental race, diabetes, and employment.
Estimates of the effect of parental smoking remained after further adjustments for the daughters' birth weight or current body mass index.
The authors advise that, although further studies are needed to confirm these results, pregnant women should avoid smoking tobacco and being around tobacco smoke to help prevent diabetes mellitus in their adult children.
The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and The California Breast Cancer Research Program Special Research Initiative funded this study.
INFORMATION:
Founded in 1916, the Endocrine Society is the world's oldest, largest and most active organization devoted to research on hormones and the clinical practice of endocrinology. Today, the Endocrine Society's membership consists of over 18,000 scientists, physicians, educators, nurses and students in 122 countries. Society members represent all basic, applied and clinical interests in endocrinology. The Endocrine Society is based in Washington, DC. To learn more about the Society and the field of endocrinology, visit our site at http://www.endocrine.org. Follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/#!/EndoMedia.
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2015-03-07
San Diego, CA--In older men, decreased sexual activity and desire, not erectile dysfunction, may cause serum testosterone to decline, a new study from Australia finds. The results will be presented Saturday March 7, at ENDO 2015, the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society, in San Diego.
"We found that over two years, men with declining serum concentrations of testosterone were more likely to develop a significant decrease in their sexual activity and sexual desire. In older men, decreased sexual activity and desire may be a cause - not an effect - of low circulating ...
2015-03-07
San Diego, CA--Why men have more heart disease than premenopausal women has been unclear, but a new study shows that the sex hormones testosterone and estrogen alter cardiovascular risk factors in a way that raises a man's risk of heart disease. Results of the study will be presented Saturday at the Endocrine Society's 97th annual meeting in San Diego.
Men have higher testosterone and lower estrogen levels than premenopausal women. Therefore, doctors have suspected that testosterone may promote cardiovascular disease or that estrogen may protect against it, or both, according ...
2015-03-07
San Diego, CA-- Breast cancer survivors are at increased risk of developing thyroid cancer, especially within five years of their breast cancer diagnosis, according to a new analysis of a large national database. The study results will be presented Thursday at the Endocrine Society's 97th annual meeting in San Diego.
"Recognition of this association between breast and thyroid cancer should prompt vigilant screening for thyroid cancer among breast cancer survivors," said lead investigator Jennifer Hong Kuo, MD, assistant professor of surgery at Columbia University, New ...
2015-03-07
San Diego, CA-- An experimental drug causes loss of weight and fat in mice, a new study has found. The study results will be presented Friday at the Endocrine Society's 97th annual meeting in San Diego.
Known as GC-1, the drug reportedly speeds up metabolism, or burning off, of fat cells.
"GC-1 dramatically increases the metabolic rate, essentially converting white fat, which stores excess calories and is associated with obesity and metabolic disease, into a fat like calorie-burning brown fat," said study author Kevin Phillips, PhD, a researcher at Houston Methodist ...
2015-03-07
San Diego, CA-- A trained scent dog accurately identified whether patients' urine samples had thyroid cancer or were benign (noncancerous) 88.2 percent of the time, according to a new study, to- be presented Friday at the Endocrine Society's 97th annual meeting in San Diego.
"Current diagnostic procedures for thyroid cancer often yield uncertain results, leading to recurrent medical procedures and a large number of thyroid surgeries performed unnecessarily," said the study's senior investigator, Donald Bodenner, MD, PhD, chief of endocrine oncology at the University of ...
2015-03-06
People with anorexia nervosa and with body dysmorphic disorder have similar abnormalities in their brains that affect their ability to process visual information, a new UCLA study reveals.
People with anorexia have such an intense fear of gaining weight that they starve themselves even when they are dangerously thin. Body dysmorphic disorder is a psychiatric condition characterized by an obsessive preoccupation with a perceived flaw in physical appearance.
The researchers found that people with both disorders had abnormal activity in the visual cortex of the brain during ...
2015-03-06
San Diego, CA -- A tooth enamel abnormality in children, molar incisor hypomineralization (MIH), may result from exposure to the industrial chemical bisphenol A (BPA), authors of a new study conclude after finding similar damage to the dental enamel of rats that received BPA. The study results will be presented Friday at the Endocrine Society's 97th annual meeting in San Diego.
"Human enamel defects may be used as an early marker of exposure to BPA and similar-acting endocrine disruptors," Babajko said.
BPA is an endocrine disruptor, or hormone-altering chemical, that ...
2015-03-06
Herpes simplex virus infections are an enormous global health problem and there is currently no viable vaccine. For nearly three decades, immunologists' efforts to develop a herpes vaccine have centered on exploiting a single protein found on the virus's outer surface that is known to elicit robust production of antibodies. Breaking from this approach, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine have created a genetic mutant lacking that protein. The result is a powerfully effective vaccine against herpes viruses.
"We have ...
2015-03-06
March 10, 2015--(BRONX, NY)--Scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have designed a new type of vaccine that could be the first-ever for preventing genital herpes--one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases, affecting some 500 million people worldwide. By using a counterintuitive scientific approach, researchers were able to prevent both active and latent infections caused by herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2), the virus that causes genital herpes. Findings from the research, conducted in mice, were published today in the online ...
2015-03-06
San Diego, CA--Exposure to low doses of hormone-disrupting chemicals early in life can alter gene expression in the liver as well as liver function, increasing the susceptibility to obesity and other metabolic diseases in adulthood, a new study finds. Results of the animal study will be presented Friday at the Endocrine Society's 97th annual meeting in San Diego.
Brief exposure in infancy to several industrial chemicals that are common in the human environment, particularly bisphenol A (BPA), caused fatty liver disease in adulthood, the researchers found in rats.
"Even ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Female fetuses exposed to tobacco smoke may have increased diabetes risk in middle age
