Reducing Your Child's Risk of Type 2 Diabetes Through Embryo Screening

If you're a parent with type 2 diabetes, or you have an immediate family member with the condition, chances are you've occasionally thought about what you might be able to do to prevent your child from getting the disease. Typical advice given for parents in your situation is about lifestyle: what foods to feed your children, how to keep them physically active, how to manage their weight, and even advice about breastfeeding.

These are all solid targets to focus on. But they are, in some sense, missing the forest for the trees. The biggest determinant of whether or not you get diabetes is not lifestyle, or diet, or physical activity. It's genetics.

Medical professionals have understandably focused on these lifestyle factors because parents can do something about them. But in the last couple of years, it has actually become possible to intervene on the genetic side as well.

Even among couples where both parents have diabetes, not all of their children will develop the condition. And even among parents where neither has diabetes, sometimes the child will develop it.

People often attribute these differences in outcomes to lifestyle differences; maybe one child was more physically active, or managed to keep their weight lower. That often is part of the story.

But the other part of the story has to do with each child's "genetic roll of the dice."

Unlike simpler genetic conditions such as sickle cell or Tay-Sachs, type 2 diabetes isn't caused by a single gene. There are hundreds of genetic variants that all play a role in influencing a person's risk of diabetes. And sometimes a child will get an unlucky roll of the dice and end up with many high-risk genetic variants from both parents.

This is the missing puzzle piece explaining why some children get diabetes and others don't; it's not just lifestyle differences — genetic differences also play a major role.

Over the last decade, scientists have begun to learn exactly which genetic differences contribute to some people developing diabetes and others avoiding it. We've now discovered well over a hundred such variants. Even a single letter change in the DNA can increase or decrease someone's risk of the disease.

Our knowledge is at the point where we can actually, with some degree of accuracy, predict whether someone will develop diabetes in their lifetime, and at what age.

This is useful for adults, who can learn whether they are at high risk and modify their diet or lifestyle to reduce their risk of developing the condition, but it is perhaps more useful for parents, especially those going through IVF.

It is possible to genetically sequence each embryo produced during IVF and predict the odds that each of them will develop type 2 diabetes in their lifetime. If parents are fortunate enough to have more embryos than they want children, they can choose to implant an embryo with a low risk of diabetes, reducing their child's risk of developing the disease.

Predicting these kinds of traits based on genetics is Herasight's core business; we've spent thousands of hours training and testing the world's best genetic predictors for type 2 diabetes and many other traits and conditions.

A couple with one diabetic parent and five chromosomally normal embryos can reduce their child's risk of diabetes by almost 50% just by picking the embryo with the lowest risk.

If you're curious about how much you can reduce your own child's risk, visit the calculator page on our website to see how much you can likely reduce your child's risk of type 2 diabetes.

If you're interested in learning more or using Herasight's screening to reduce your own child's risk, please reach out to us.