Gestational Diabetes

So you’re at the doctor’s office for your pregnancy check-up, and your doctor tells you that you have gestational diabetes. Should you be worried? The short answer is yes, and the following article will explain why.

Gestational diabetes shows up in about 130,000 cases each year. Pregnant women who have never had diabetes before have an inherent risk of contracting gestational diabetes if their blood sugar levels are high during pregnancy.

No one knows what causes gestational diabetes, but there are some theories out there. Some think that hormones in the placenta, while nourishing the baby, blocks the mother’s ability to process insulin in her own body. This is called insulin resistance, and it makes the mother’s body work harder and harder to use it’s own insulin. Some women need as much as three times the amount of insulin to sustain a healthy body during pregnancy.

Gestational diabetes starts when a woman’s body cannot make and use all the insulin it produces. This leads to glucose inability to leave the blood and be converted to energy. The glucose eventually builds up to extremely high levels and causes hyperglycemia. Left unchecked, this can lead to huge health risks for mother and baby.

Gestational diabetes develops in later stages of pregnancy, long after the baby’s body is formed, but before it stops growing. Gestational diabetes causes the pancreas to increase it’s production of insulin, but that insulin doesn’t lower the glucose levels in the mother. While insulin cannot be passed through the placenta, glucose and other proteins can. If left unchecked, the excess glucose will pass to the baby and cause the baby’s pancreas to produce more insulin than normal to compensate. Since the energy from the glucose is excess, the baby’s body will store it as fat, causing what’s know as macrosomia, which is the scientific term for a fat baby.

Babies with macrosomia have health risks of their own, including shoulder damage during birth. Macrosomia babies that overproduce insulin may be born with low blood sugar and can have breathing problems at birth. Babies with excess insulin are more likely to become obese during childhood, and develop type 2 diabetes during adulthood.