Why do some children develop attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and some don’t? A new study points to two specific risk factors: having a mom who developed gestational diabetes while pregnant and being born into a poor or lower-middle-class home, according to a CNN report.
Children whose mothers were diagnosed with gestational diabetes were twice as likely as their peers to meet the criteria for ADHD at age six.
And living in a family with below-average socioeconomic status had the same effect: it doubled the risk of ADHD, according to CNN.
Add the two risk factors together, and kids have a “14-fold increased risk of ADHD compared to children with neither risk factor.”
While researchers say the study, which appears in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, doesn’t reveal a cause and effect relationship between the risk factors and ADHD, they do say the findings, “send a message to mothers and doctors that gestational diabetes may pose hidden dangers to a child well after birth, especially if the child grows up in a challenging environment,” reports CNN.
"Mothers should be aware that gestational diabetes can affect her fetus," psychiatry professor Yoko Nomura, the lead author of the study told CNN.
Gestational diabetes - characterized by abnormally-high blood sugar - affects roughly five per cent of expectant mothers in the United States and develops during the second or third trimester of pregnancy. Researchers point out that that’s the same time “a fetus undergoes a critical burst of brain development,” according to CNN.
Growing up in poverty would likely aggravate any underlying nervous-system deficits, Prof. Nomura told CNN.
"When babies are born into higher socioeconomic status households, they have better access to medical care [and] remedial activities, intellectual stimulus is higher, they have better foods," she said.
Although the researchers outlined shortcomings to the paper, including a lack of data on family histories of ADHD, researcher Joel Nigg argues that just as previous work has linked ADHD with exposure to lead and some pesticides, gestational diabetes should be considered in the same light.
“As a precaution, we might want to add [gestational diabetes] to the list of risk factors we're aware of,” Prof Nigg, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study, told CNN.
