Association between early-pregnancy serum C-peptide and risk of gestational diabetes mellitus: a nested case–control study among Chinese women

OBJECTIVE: To examine the association of early-pregnancy serum C-peptide with incident gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) and the predictive ability of maternal C-peptide for GDM. METHODS: A nested case–control study of 332 GDM cases and 664 controls was established based on the Tongji-Shuangliu Birth Cohort. The GDM cases and controls were matched at 1:2 on maternal age (± 3 years) and gestational age (± 4 weeks). Multivariable conditional logistic regression was applied to assess the association of C-peptide with risk of GDM. Partial Spearman’s correlation coefficients were estimated for the correlations between C-peptide and multiple metabolic biomarkers. C-statistics were calculated to assess the predictive ability of early-pregnancy C-peptide for GDM. RESULTS: Of 996 pregnant women, median maternal age was 28.0 years old and median gestational age was 11.0 weeks. After adjustment for potential confounders, the odds ratio of GDM comparing the extreme quartiles of C-peptide was 2.28 (95% confidence interval, 1.43, 3.62; P for trend < 0.001). Partial correlation coefficients ranged between 0.07 and 0.77 for the correlations of C-peptide with fasting insulin, homeostatic model of insulin resistance, leptin, fasting blood glucose, triglycerides, glycosylated hemoglobin, waist–hip ratio, systolic blood pressure, and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (P ≤ 0.025), and were − 0.11 and − 0.17 for high-density lipoprotein cholesterol and adiponectin (P < 0.001). Serum C-peptide slightly improved the predictive performance of the model with conventional predictive factors (0.66 vs. 0.63; P = 0.008). CONCLUSION: While the predictive value for subsequent GDM should be validated, early-pregnancy serum C-peptide may be positively associated with risk of GDM. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12986-022-00691-3.