Low Birth Weight, Prematurity - Leads to Diabetes in Adolescence

As the parents of a child who was born prematurely, there is no doubt that you understand the full spectrum and risks associated with your premature child's most immediate health complications. From complications involving respiration and lung development to complications involving neurological and gastrointestinal function, premature infants, or those of low birth weight, often experience very difficult early childhood growth and development.

The complications associated with premature birth, and low birth weight, may not end with child growth and development. In fact, many adolescents, today, who suffer from type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular complications are found to have suffered from low birth weight, even when not necessarily born premature.

While this information may be surprising to you as the parent of a premature infant, or an infant with low birth weight, some parents are finding that this risk for insulin resistance, low insulin levels and type 2 diabetes development, is a factor they wish to avoid by managing their infant's health through childhood and into adolescence.

In response to these findings, some parents may feel their low birth weight infant will be at risk for developing a diabetic complication and, as a result, may work to control and prevent the development of insulin resistance and diabetes by working to regulate the child's body mass index, diet and exercise. In the research of adolescents, however, there is no correlation between this risk for insulin resistance and BMI and low or high birth weight. In other words, controlling a teen's BMI levels may not serve any benefit in terms of controlling the development of type 2 diabetes.

In terms of cardiovascular complications, studies show that your low birth weight infant, while at risk for cardiovascular disease into adulthood, will most likely never show complications during adolescence. For this reason, the primary focus, as the parent of a low birth weight infant, should simply be on the management of metabolic disorders.