Not all babies of diabetic moms need calcium check

By Megan Rauscher

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Results of a study raise questions about the need to routinely check the blood calcium level of every infant born to a mother with diabetes, according to a presentation at the American Academy of Pediatrics annual meeting in Atlanta.

Dr. Samrat U. Das, of the Metropolitan Hospital Center in New York, told Reuters Health: "Our study suggests that we should check the calcium level only if the baby is born to a mother who has been diabetic before her pregnancy, and, in cases of (pregnancy-related) gestational diabetes, we should do calcium levels only when the mother had very high blood sugar during the pregnancy."

Good control of diabetes during pregnancy lowers the chances of hypocalcemia (low calcium) in newborns, which can cause serious problems including seizures. "Therefore, we wanted to see whether we really need to do calcium levels routinely in all babies since there have been improvements in blood glucose control over the past few years," the researcher explained.

Das and co-investigator Dr. Pratibha Ankola analyzed serum calcium levels 24 hours after birth in 43 newborns of mothers who developed diabetes during pregnancy (gestational diabetes) and six newborns of mothers who had diabetes before pregnancy (pre-gestational diabetes). They also reviewed the blood sugar control patterns of the mothers.

"For mothers who became diabetic for the first time during their pregnancy, their babies did not tend to develop low calcium levels," said Das.

Only one of the 43 newborns born to mothers with gestational diabetes had hypocalcemia, which corresponds to an incidence of 2.3 percent. "The maternal blood glucose pattern of this newborn showed lack of adequate control prenatally," the investigators report in meeting materials.

By contrast, two out of the six newborns born to women with pre-gestational diabetes had hypocalcemia, corresponding to an incidence of 33 percent.

"If our findings can be replicated on a larger scale, there won't be any need to unnecessarily draw blood from newborns to check calcium levels," said Das.