Tuesday March 8, 2016 (foodconsumer.org) -- Liwei Chen at Clemson University in Clemson, SC and colleagues reported in Diabetes Care that women who had an early menarche were more likely to suffer gestational diabetes mellitus.The study of 27,000 women in the Nurses' Health Study II showed that women who had first menstrual bleeding at 11 years or earlier were 34% more likely to experience gestational diabetes mellitus during pregnancy, compared to those who had it at 14 years or older.The study also found this increased risk of gestational diabetes mellitus is largely mediated through the pre-pregnancy excessive body adiposity. (David Liu)Liwei Chen, Shanshan Li, Chunyan He, Yeyi Zhu, Germaine M. Buck Louis, Edwina Yeung, Frank B. Hu, and Cuilin Zhang, Age at Menarche and Risk of Gestational Diabetes Mellitus: A Prospective Cohort Study Among 27,482 Women, Diabetes Care March 2016 vol. 39 no. 3 469-471