According to U.S. researchers, women who suffer from diabetes before getting pregnant are approximately three times as likely as other women to have a baby born with at least one deficiency.

A range of distinct birth defects are linked to mothers who have type 1 diabetes, also called juvenile diabetes though it is not exclusively a childhood problem, or type 2 diabetes, a form of disease usually connected with obesity and characterized as an epidemic by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the researchers said on Wednesday.

The defects of the heart, brain, spine, limbs, kidneys and gastrointestinal tract, penile and ear abnormalities and cleft palate are among the effects associated with mothers suffering from diabetes, a disease whose annual cost in medical expenditures was an estimated $132 billion in the United States alone in 2002, according to the National Diabetes Information Clearinghouse. 

"This study documents the fact that diabetes is associated with a wider range of defects than we had been aware of in the past," said Dr. Adolfo Correa, medical officer at the CDC and study’s lead author.

The research study, which has been published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, involved 13,030 babies born with one or multiple birth defects across the U.S. and 4,895 babies without birth defects. Knowing the mothers who had diabetes before getting pregnant was essential for the study’s findings.