TOPLINE:
Previous gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) nearly doubles future chronic kidney disease (CKD) risk, irrespective of subsequent diabetes and hypertension, a study showed.
METHODOLOGY:
- A nationwide, cohort study was based on data from the Danish Medical Birth Register and included 697,622 women who gave birth between 1997 and 2018.
- Of all study participants, 3.4% reported GDM in at least one pregnancy, and 12.8% of women with GDM received insulin, a proxy for a more severe metabolic dysfunction.
- The women were followed up for a median of 11.9 years.
- Researchers studied CKD and acute kidney disease as the outcomes of interest, the mediating effects of subsequent diabetes and hypertension on future CKD, and how GDM severity affected later risk for kidney disease.
TAKEAWAY:
- Women with GDM showed significantly higher CKD risk than those without GDM (adjusted hazard ratio [aHR], 1.92; 95% CI, 1.67-2.21).
- Women who received insulin during pregnancy due to severe metabolic dysfunction but did not develop subsequent diabetes had a proportionally higher risk for CKD (aHR, 2.35; 95% CI, 1.39-3.97).
- Women with GDM who went on to develop diabetes or hypertension faced even higher risks for CKD, suggesting that preventing diabetes and hypertension after GDM may reduce the development of CKD.
- GDM did not affect the risk for acute kidney disease (aHR, 1.08; 95% CI, 0.90-1.29).
IN PRACTICE:
“Women with severe metabolic dysfunction during pregnancy constitute a high-risk group regarding future CKD,” the authors wrote. “The significantly elevated CKD risk was observed from 2 years after pregnancy and beyond.”
SOURCE:
The study, with first author Maria Hornstrup Christensen, of Odense University Hospital, Odense, Denmark, was published online on December 15 in Diabetes Care.
LIMITATIONS:
GDM may be underdiagnosed, and undiagnosed diabetes may be misclassified as GDM. The proxies of GDM and insulin treatment may not have captured the increasing severity of metabolic dysfunction. The prevalence of insulin treatment was lower than expected, perhaps due to the practice of providing a patient’s first insulin pen without a prescription and perhaps not recording it in a patient’s health record.
DISCLOSURES:
This work received financial support from the University of Southern Denmark, the Region of Southern Denmark, and the Danish Diabetes Academy, which is funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation. The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
A version of this article appeared on Medscape.com.