Every expectant mother wants her pregnancy to go smoothly. Still, complications can arise, and gestational diabetes is one of the more common ones — gestational diabetes affects up to 9% of pregnancies each year in the United States.
Since November is National Diabetes Month in the US, Dr. Fernando Otero and the team at Women’s Clinic of the Rio Grande Valley want to discuss this important high-risk pregnancy topic.
In the following, we review what gestational diabetes is and who is more at risk for this common pregnancy complication.
Gestational diabetes is diabetes that’s diagnosed during pregnancy, so it has nothing to do with preexisting diabetes. Instead, women with no history of the disease suddenly develop insulin resistance, which can lead to unhealthy glucose levels that can affect the health of both the mother and the unborn child.
There’s a lot that researchers don’t know about gestational diabetes, but we do know that it tends to develop between weeks 24 and 28. This timing is due to increased placental hormones that may block the mother’s insulin.
While gestational diabetes is largely temporary, it needs to be addressed and treated during your pregnancy. The condition also raises your risk of developing more permanent Type 2 diabetes afterward.
While we still don’t know the exact cause-and-effect mechanism, enough research has been conducted that we know some women are more at risk for gestational diabetes than others.
Some of the primary risk factors for gestational diabetes include:
If you have obesity upon entering your pregnancy, it places you at far greater risk for gestational diabetes. If you consider that about 40% of adults in the US have obesity, this is a common risk factor.
If you don’t have a strong history of pre-pregnancy exercise and activity, your risks for gestational diabetes are elevated.
More women are having babies later in life, so many pregnancies fall into the high-risk category based on advanced maternal age — being 35 and older. And this advanced age appears to raise your risk for complications like gestational diabetes.
There are other risk factors for gestational diabetes, such as:
Please know that some women develop gestational diabetes outside these risk factors, and other women have these risk factors and never develop the condition. These are risk factors, not a guarantee.
Rest assured, we monitor insulin levels and test all women for gestational diabetes during their pregnancy so that we can stay one step ahead of this common complication.
If you have more questions about gestational diabetes and whether you should be concerned, we invite you to contact one of our offices in McAllen or Edinburg, Texas, to schedule an appointment.
