Cardiac Malformations in Fetuses of Gestational and Pre Gestational Diabetic Mothers

Objective: in this study we aimed to determine the prevalence of cardiac malformations in fetuses of iranian diabetic mothers with pre-gestational and gestational diabetes mellitus (gdm) and to find the patterns of different cardiac malformations. methods: one-hundred and seventy diabetic pregnant women (68 pregdm and 102 gdm) (mean age: 32.17±4.8 years) and 85 healthy controls (mean age: 31.35±4.55 years) were recruited from september 2008 to july 2012. fetal echocardiography was performed to assess cardiac malformation. in order to study major factors that may affect the results, a complete history was obtained. findings: fetal echocardiography was performed at mean gestational age of 24.7±5.4 and 20.27±3.9 weeks in diabetic patients and control group, respectively. fifteen (8.8%) fetuses of diabetic mothers were detected to have cardiac malformations compared with 1 (1.17%) fetus in control group (or: 8.13, 95%ci: 1.1-62.61, p-value=0.02). hypertrophic cardiomyopathy noted as the most common cardiac malformation occurred in 6 out of 15 (40%) fetuses, and was found significantly more common in pre-gdm compared to gdm group (7.4% vs 1%, p-value =0.04). despite the higher incidence of cardiac malformation in pre-gdm compared to gdm group, the difference was not significant. further, no significant association was observed between the variables including; parity, diabetic regimen, parents’ consanguinity, maternal history of hypertension or hypothyroidism and occurring cardiac malformations (p-value >0.05). conclusion: in this study we detected cardiac malformations in 8.8% of our diabetic referrals. the result of the present study shows that screening diabetic mothers for fetal cardiac malformations could be beneficial.