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Record W4414781793 · doi:10.1186/s13148-025-01972-3

In-utero exposure to maternal diabetes and DNA methylation alterations in the Next Generation birth cohort

2025· article· en· W4414781793 on OpenAlex
Ola E. Salama, Yash Rawal, Priscilla Irabor, Haziqa Kassim, Christy Pylypjuk, Elizabeth Sellers, Brandy Wicklow, Meaghan J. Jones

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueClinical Epigenetics · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicGestational Diabetes Research and Management
Canadian institutionsManitoba HealthUniversity of ManitobaChildren's Hospital Research Institute of Manitoba
FundersCanadian Institutes of Health ResearchChildren's Hospital Research Institute of ManitobaDiabetes Canada
KeywordsdNaMDNA methylationDiabetes mellitusPregnancyHuman geneticsEpigeneticsType 2 diabetesCohort study

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

INTRODUCTION: The incidence of type 2 diabetes (T2D) in youth is increasing and in-utero exposure to maternal diabetes is a known risk factor, with higher risk associated with pregestational T2D exposure compared to gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) exposure. We hypothesize this differential risk is reflected in DNA methylation (DNAm) changes induced by differential timing of in-utero exposure to maternal diabetes, and that exposure to diabetes throughout pregnancy (T2D) compared to exposure later in development (GDM), induces different DNAm signatures and different T2D risk to offspring. This study presents an epigenome-wide investigation of DNAm alterations associated with in-utero exposure to either maternal pregestational T2D or GDM, to determine if the timing of prenatal diabetes exposure differentially alters DNAm. METHODS: We performed an epigenome-wide analysis on cord blood from 99 newborns exposed to pregestational T2D, 70 newborns exposed to GDM, and 41 unexposed to diabetes in-utero from the Next Generation birth cohort. Associations were tested using multiple linear regression models while adjusting for sex, maternal age, BMI, smoking status, gestational age, cord blood cell type proportions and batch effects. RESULTS: We identified 27 differentially methylated sites associated with exposure to GDM, 27 sites associated with exposure to T2D, and 9 common sites associated with exposure to either GDM or T2D (adjusted p value < 0.05 and effect size estimate > 0.01). One site at CLDN15 and two unannotated sites were previously reported as associated with obesity. We also identified 87 differentially methylated regions (DMRs) associated with in-utero exposure to GDM and 69 DMRs associated with in-utero exposure to T2D. We identified 23 DMR sites that were previously associated with obesity, three with T2D and five with in-utero exposure to GDM. Furthermore, we identified six CpG sites in the PTPRN2 gene, a gene previously associated with DNAm differences in blood of youth with T2D from the same population. CONCLUSION: Our findings support that in-utero exposure to maternal diabetes is associated with DNAm alterations in offspring. Moreover, the timing of maternal diabetes in-utero exposure (GDM or T2D) produces overlapping but distinct DNAm patterns, suggesting that the window of exposure to maternal diabetes produces different molecular modifications and may reflect, at least in part, the difference in risk for youth-onset T2D in offspring. We also identified sites in this study that have been previously associated with T2D or obesity, which may serve as potential early-life biomarkers of exposure and/or risk, warranting further investigation in longitudinal studies.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.026
Threshold uncertainty score0.235

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.082
GPT teacher head0.397
Teacher spread0.316 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it