About Gestational Diabetes
- What is gestational diabetes?
- What complications can occur with gestational diabetes?
- What are the risk factors for gestational diabetes?
- How is gestational diabetes diagnosed?
What is gestational diabetes?
Gestational diabetes can develop during the second half of pregnancy (between 24 and 28 weeks) and usually goes away after the baby is born. Gestational diabetes describes any degree of glucose (sugar) intolerance that begins during pregnancy and requires insulin or diet modification as treatment, whether or not the condition persists after pregnancy. Approximately 7 percent (or more than 200,000) of all pregnancies each year are complicated by gestational diabetes.
Having gestational diabetes does not mean the baby will be born with diabetes or birth defects, but women with gestational diabetes are at a higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes later in life. There are three reasons as to why the blood glucose would be high during pregnancy: pregnancy hormones; the body's insufficient use of insulin; and eating too much, too often or the wrong foods.
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What complications can occur with gestational diabetes?
Complications of gestational diabetes include:
- Macrosomic infant (a large baby), which increases the chances of a cesarean delivery (C-section)
- Low blood sugar for the baby at birth
- Pre-eclampsia in the pregnant woman
- Pre-term delivery
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What are the risk factors for gestational diabetes?
Most health care providers assess a pregnant woman's risk for developing gestational diabetes during the first prenatal visit. These risk factors include:
- Being more than 25 years of age, or less than 25 years of age but overweight
- Having a family history of diabetes
- Previously delivering a baby weighing more than 9 pounds or with a birth defect
- Having a previous unexplained stillbirth
- Having a personal history of gestational diabetes
- Being of Hispanic, Native American, African-American, Asian-American or Pacific Islander descent
- Having polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS)
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How is gestational diabetes diagnosed?
Unless a woman is categorized as high risk early in her pregnancy, she will have an oral glucose challenge test, which measures how well a person's body metabolizes or uses sugar, between weeks 24 to 28 of pregnancy to initially screen for gestational diabetes. The woman will drink a concentrated sugar solution and have blood drawn exactly one hour later. If the test results indicate her blood sugar is high, further tests (including an oral glucose tolerance test) will be ordered to determine if the woman has gestational diabetes.
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