Study of Metabolic Profile in Infants of Diabetic Mothers

Abstract

For women with diabetes mellitus, pregnancy can present some particular challenges for both mother and child. If the woman has diabetes as an inter-current disease in pregnancy, it can cause different illnesses of their child. Metabolomics in maternal-fetal medicine is still an “embryonic” science. However, there is already an increasing interest in metabolome of normal and complicated pregnancies, and neonatal outcomes. Tissues used for metabolomics interrogations of pregnant women, fetuses and newborns are amniotic fluid, blood, plasma, cord blood, placenta, urine, and vaginal secretions. The metabolomic approach consists of two sequential phases. The analytical phase is designed to profile all low molecular weight metabolites in a given biological specimen to generate an all-inclusive spectrum. Possible sources of biological tissues that can be exploited in pregnancy are both from the mother (plasma, urine, vaginal fluids, milk), the fetus (amniotic fluid, umbilical cord blood), and the newborn (plasma, urine, placenta, saliva, other fluids). Different technologies might be generally adopted such as tandam mass spectrometry. The phase of data analysis and interpretation requires highly complex data mining software and an ample