pregnancy and Diabetes

0
inShare

It can be shocking to be told you have diabetes when you’re pregnant. But the truth is, about 2 percent of women will develop diabetes at some point in the pregnancy, making it one of the most common medical complications of pregnancy. That’s not including women who were already diabetic when they became pregnant.
It’s important to find out whether you have diabetes. If you have it and your sugar levels are not under control, your baby can grow to be too big due to your high blood sugar level. It’s more difficult to deliver a large baby, and your chance of having a Cesarean section is greater.

                           

Health topics: Diabetes and Pregnancy

Larger babies also can have low blood sugar after birth, which needs to be treated with early feeding of the baby, and sometimes sugar water bottles or even intravenous sugar.
That’s why we routinely test for gestational diabetes. If you are obese, if you are over 25, if you have a family history of diabetes or have had a large baby previously, you will be tested. Many doctors test all women at 26 to 28 weeks into the pregnancy (as measured from the last menstrual period) with something called a glucose challenge test.
With the glucose challenge test, you will be asked to eat or drink a measured amount of sugar (50 grams), wait an hour and then have a blood test. If your sugar level is high, you will be asked to take a glucose tolerance test. In this test, you’ll fast overnight and have a blood sugar test as a baseline. After that, you will take in 100 grams of sugar, followed by blood tests at one, two and three hours after eating.
If two or more of the values come back from the lab higher than normal, a diagnosis of gestational diabetes is made. In most women, the diabetes occurred during the pregnancy and will go away once the baby is born. A fraction of patients were already diabetic before the pregnancy and were undiagnosed. Those women will continue to have diabetes after the pregnancy. We tell the difference by another sugar test a couple of months after birth.
Diabetes is characterized by high blood sugar. One of the effects of the hormones produced by the placenta is to counter the effects of insulin. You may have higher blood sugar levels than normal, despite your body producing normal levels of insulin. This is a simple explanation of a complex disease.
Treatment of gestational diabetes starts with diet, which is frequently enough to correct the problem. It’s not a weight reduction diet; there are plenty of calories allowed (around 2,200). The emphasis is on complex carbohydrates and protein, with avoidance of simple sugars and too much fat.
If your birth plan includes no sugar water for the baby, you may want to remind your pediatrician about the diagnosis of diabetes, so that the nursery can keep a close eye on the baby’s sugar levels. Occasionally, if your sugars have been high, the baby may get dangerously low sugar levels in the first few hours after birth and need more sugar than she can get from nursing alone.
The only long-term complication of gestational diabetes is a higher risk of developing diabetes later on in life. Early diagnosis is very important in reducing risk of later complications of diabetes.
The diagnosis of gestational diabetes is not a big problem if it is attended to during the pregnancy. Some doctors think it shouldn’t even qualify as a “disease.”

Related Posts :