9. A Family Cycle of Diabetes

Anahad O’Connor, a contributor to The New York Times, wrote an article about the cycle of diabetes between children and their mothers. A recent study shows that children born to women with gestational diabetes have a much higher likelihood of developing Type 2 diabetes as teenagers. Over the course of three years, researchers followed 255 obese adolescents, of whom about 1/5 were exposed to gestational diabetes in the womb. At the beginning of the study, all adolescents took tests that showed they all had normal glucose tolerance. Three years later, they found that the teens that were born to mothers with the condition were six times more likely to have acquired prediabetes or diabetes themselves in comparison to the other teens. Dr. Sonia Caprio, a study author and professor of pediatric endocrinology at Yale, said that children exposed to gestational diabetes already showed less function in the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas. She said the lack of cell function might occur due to environmental changes or epigenetic changes in the womb. This is concerning because the amount of people with gestational diabetes is increasing in the United States. Dr. Caprio says women have to watch their weight (not gain too much) when they are pregnant because it could prevent diabetes not only on themselves, but also on their children.

This article was informative and persuasive. O’Connor talks about a research that was made on teenagers and thoroughly explained its results. In addition, he includes insight from an outside source, Dr. Sonia Caprio, and her thoughts on the findings. He also explains why the information is important and why people should be concerned about it. He concludes with Dr. Caprio’s idea on how to prevent diabetes in children, which is by preventing pregnant women from gaining a lot of weight. His diction is mostly informal, because he took complicated information from a research and wrote it in a simpler, casual way to make the reader easily understand the findings. He successfully transmitted the information and made the reader understand what can be done to avoid the problem.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/08/a-family-cycle-of-diabetes/?ref=health