Many men of childbearing age have diabetes and undergo treatments to regulate insulin. Researchers from the University of Denmark and Stanford University (United States) therefore sought to assess whether the risk of congenital malformations was likely to vary in children born to men treated with insulin, metformin or sulfonylureas before conception.
The findings of their study, which has just been published in the journal Annals of internal medicine, reveal that babies born to men who took metformin during the period of sperm development have an increased risk of birth defects. And especially the boys. In contrast, there was no increased risk in babies born to fathers taking insulin. And there were too few babies whose fathers took sulfonylureas to determine with certainty the risks of birth defects.
For this study, researchers studied 1,116,779 babies born in Denmark between 1996 and 2017 to mothers who did not have diabetes or high blood pressure. Babies were considered exposed to a diabetes drug if their father filled at least 1 prescription during the 3 months that fertilizing sperm were developing.
According to the authors of this study, young men who plan to conceive a child should consider (…)
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