BMJ 2002;324:674 ( 16 March )

Letters

Adult obesity and growth in childhood

    Fuel mediated teratogenesis driven by maternal obesity may be responsible for pandemic of obesity
    Obstetricians seem reluctant to consider interventions to reduce mean birth weight
    Association of birth weight with adult weight is confounded by maternal body mass index
    Mothers tend to pass their dietary habits on to their children
    Factors that programme resistance to obesity must be identified

Fuel mediated teratogenesis driven by maternal obesity may be responsible for pandemic of obesity

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR---Parsons et al highlight the importance of maternal weight on birth weight and future obesity in the offspring.1 They emphasise the importance of genetics and debate the relation between reduced intrauterine growth on future obesity but do not discuss the role of fuel mediated teratogenesis during fetal development.2

Fuel mediated teratogenesis proposes that intrauterine exposure of the fetus of women with diabetes in pregnancy to an excess of fuel (for example, glucose) causes permanent fetal change, leading to malformations, greater birth weight, and an increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes in later life.2 More recently, obesity in the offspring has been included as an outcome of fuel mediated teratogenesis in pregnancies complicated by diabetes. 3 4 However, maternal fuel supply across a population is a continuum, and the criteria for gestational diabetes may not be sufficient to differentiate between a diabetogenic and a non-diabetogenic intrauterine milieu.

We investigated the relation . . . [Full text of this article]
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