Maternal Diabetes Linked to Increased Risk for Epilepsy in Offspring

TUESDAY, Feb. 10, 2026 (HealthDay News) — Maternal diabetes (type 1 diabetes mellitus [T1DM], type 2 diabetes mellitus [T2DM], and gestational diabetes mellitus [GDM]) is associated with an increased risk for epilepsy in offspring, according to a study published online Feb. 4 in Pediatrics.

Bénédicte Driollet, Ph.D., from McGill University in Montreal, and colleagues conducted a retrospective cohort study of all in-hospital live births between 2002 and 2018 in Ontario, Canada, to examine the association between diabetes subtype and risk for epilepsy in offspring. The crude and adjusted association among T1DM, T2DM, and GDM and epilepsy was estimated in children aged younger than 18 years.

Overall, 7.6 percent of the 2,105,553 children were exposed to maternal diabetes: 0.3, 1.2, and 6.1 percent to T1DM, T2DM, and GDM, respectively. The researchers found that 17,853 epilepsy cases were diagnosed during a median follow-up of 10.2 years. Compared with those unexposed, children exposed to maternal diabetes had an increased risk for epilepsy in all subcategories of diabetes after adjustment for maternal socioeconomic and clinical characteristics (adjusted hazard ratios, 1.40, 1.32, and 1.14 for T2DM, T1DM, and GDM, respectively). An increased risk was seen in association for longer duration of T1DM and T2DM. In a quantitative bias analysis, these results were consistent.

“These findings contribute to the evidence on the impact of prenatal and perinatal factors on the development of epilepsy,” the authors write. “Given the ongoing rise in diabetes prevalence among women, the close monitoring of young children exposed to maternal diabetes for early neurological signs of epilepsy might be warranted.”

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