The CEU San Pablo University has obtained the first metabolic footprint of human gestational diabetes, in collaboration with the Medical University of Bialystok (Poland).
Thanks to these biomarkers, in the future prevention strategies could be designed to reduce the complications that the mother and the newborn could suffer, they have explained from the university center.
Gestational diabetes is a pathology that suffers 10 percent of pregnant women.It is hyperglycemia that begins or is diagnosed for the first time during pregnancy.In addition, the prevalence is increasing significantly in recent years due to the increase in obesity and delay in the age of motherhood.
Women with gestational diabetes are more risk of complications during pregnancy, such as preeclampsia, and some studies point out that up to 30 percent of women with gestational diabetes will end up being diabetic throughout their lives.In addition, gestational diabetes increases the risk of the baby being premature and that develops obesity or type 2 diabetes in the future.
The research started from a sample of 40 women in the first quarter of pregnancy, from which blood and urine samples were analyzed through high -performance metabolomic tools.These analyzes allowed the research team to obtain a metabolic footprint, that is, a complete image of the early metabolic alterations that occur in gestational diabetes.
This footprint showed that, in these women, there are important alterations of the metabolism of complex lipids as well as an increase in oxidative stress and inflammation.It has also allowed identifying potential biomarkers that could predict the risk of pregnant women with gestational diabetes to develop a severe glucose intolerance and therefore have a greater risk of complications.
In this sense, the researchers discovered during the study that a decrease in lysophosphosphoacylglycerides with polyinsaturated fatty acids correlates with the degree of glucose intolerance that develops the pregnant woman with diabetes.
These results, recently published in 'Journal of Proteomics', suppose not only a greater knowledge of the metabolic alterations of gestational diabetes, but also help the identification of possible early markers of the disease prognosis.
Thanks to these biomarkers, in the future prevention strategies could be designed to reduce the complications that the mother and the newborn could suffer.