Pregnancy Health News: Low Vitamin B12 May Increase Offspring’s Diabetes Risk

Children born with mother deficient in vitamin B12 have greater risks of developing diabetes in them. Reportedly, a new study reveals offsprings are at risk to develop Type 2 Diabetes and other metabolic disorders.

As per a study by author Dr. Ponusammy Saravanan and his colleagues from U.K.'s University of Warwick Medical School, pregnant women with low vitamin B12 are seen to have a higher body mass index (BMI) and low-birth-weight babies with high cholesterol. This causing babies being insulin-resistant in childhood, increasing the risk for Type 2 Diabetes.

According to the National Institutes of Health, vitamin B12 helps in a number of bodily functions, which include red blood cell formation, DNA synthesis and neurological functioning. Pregnant women are expected to have 2.6mg of vitamin B12 and 2.8g while breast feeding.

Vitamin B12 is a wate-soluble vitamin naturally present in animal products. This can be found in milk, eggs, cheese, meat, poultry, fish and non-animal products like cereals.

"The nutritional environment provided by the mother can permanently program the baby's health," Dr. Ponusammy said, as quoted by Medical News. "We know that children born to under or overnourished mothers are at an increased risk of health problems such as type 2 diabetes, and we also see that maternal B12 deficiency may affect fat metabolism and contribute to this risk. This is why we decided to investigate leptin, the fat cell hormone."

According to Saravanan, low vitamin B12 drives fat accumulation in the fetus leading to increase leptin or it may cause changes in the placental genes that produce leptin leading to increase in the production of hormone. "As B12 is involved in methylation reactions in the body which can affect whether genes are turned on and off, we suspect it may be the latter," he adds.

Saravanan and his team are currently working on the study that they presented in the Society for Endocrinology annual conference in the U.K. If their research is confirmed, the dosage of vitamin B12 during pregnancy has to be reviewed.