Alireza Moharerri; Soraya Ghafari & Mohammad Jafar Golalipour

Previous study has shown the adverse effects of gestational diabetes on hippocampal and spinal cord neuronal density in animal model. This study was conducted to determine the effect of gestational diabetes on beta cells in rat pancreas in early postnatal life. In this experimental study, 10 dams randomly allocated into control and diabetic groups on day 1 of gestation. Five dams in diabetic group received 40 mg/kg/BW of streptozotocin (intraperitoneally) and control animals received normal saline. Six of 28 and 56-day-old offspring of each gestational diabetes mellitus and controls were randomly scarified and sections were taken from the pancreas and stained using Gomorra's method. The density of beta cells and number and area of pancreatic islets were evaluated by quantitative computer-assisted morphometric method. The density of beta cells of 28-day-old offspring pancreas significantly reduced from 96.23±5.0 in control group to 71.5±5.3 cells in 10000 mm2 area of islet in diabetic group (P <0.01). The number of the pancreatic islets of in gestational diabetes (15.25±3.7) significantly reduced in comparison with the controls (8.61±0.7). The density of beta cells of 56-day-old offspring pancreas significantly reduced from 105.33±8.6 in control group to 62.12±5.9 in diabetic group (P <0.01). The number of the pancreatic islets of in gestational diabetes (13.5±0.5) significantly reduced compared to controls (6.75±1.7) (P <0.01). This study revealed that gestational diabetes loss the number of the beta cells in 28 and 56-day-old rat offspring.

KEY WORDS: Gestational diabetes: Beta cell; Pancreas; Offspring; Rat.

MOHARERRI, A.; GHAFARI, S. & GOLALIPOUR, M. J. Gestational diabetes reduces pancreatic beta cells in rat offspring. Int. J. Morphol., 34(4):1386-1391, 2016.