Health of children born to mothers who had PE

[caryn]

Children born at term exposed to preeclampsia had an increased risk of a variety of diseases, such as endocrine, nutritional, and metabolic diseases (incidence rate ratio, 1.6; 95% confidence interval, 1.5-1.7), and diseases of the blood and blood-forming organs (incidence rate ratio, 1.5; 95% confidence interval, 1.3-1.8). Children born preterm exposed to preeclampsia had a similar pattern of hospitalizations compared with the children born preterm unexposed to preeclampsia, although they had a decreased risk of cerebral palsy (incidence rate ratio, 0.7; 95% confidence interval, 0.6-0.9).

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19733276

So our children are about one and a half times as likely to have various sorts of metabolic diseases. They end up in the hospital at about the same rate, and are less likely to be born with cerebral palsy. Most of those diseases are pretty rare, and 1.5 times a small number is still a small number, but this might explain some of our demographic results like an uptick in the number of children with Type I diabetes...

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[hols537]

Forgive my unscientific brain's question, but are the term babies exposed to PE at higher risk than the preterm babies exposed to PE?

[caryn]

That is worded a little bit strangely. :-)

They're trying to differentiate between problems caused by PE per se, and problems caused by prematurity. So they looked at the population of term PE babies versus term non-PE babies to find the difference in disease rates, and they looked at preterm PE babies versus term non-PE babies to find the difference in hospitalization rates. The idea was that preterm PE babies might experience hospitalization at different rates (they don't) and that PE babies generally might have a different distribution of disease (they do, but not of things related to their precipitious deliveries, or they'd be hospitalized more frequently than preterm non-PE babies.)

So all of the PE babies are at higher risk of (comparatively rare) metabolic disorders -- this might be because the genes that cause those disorders also affect placentation, or, in other words, not caused by PE but just correlated to it -- but not more likely to be hospitalized as preemies.

Does that make sense?

[hols537]

Yes, thanks for explaining!

[rebeccac]

Being diabetic myself, I was worried about my child developing it and questioned many health care professionals before becoming pregnant. No one had a clear answer as to if it would happen or not. Throw this in and I would guess the chances become greater. As the saying goes, "whatever will be, will be". At least I'm familiar with what to look for and how to take care of it if need be.

Where can I get a copy of this to show my endocrinologist?

[caryn]

Rebecca, I can't believe I forgot to paste the link. :-) It's there now!