Pregnant Women Face Additional Diabetes Risk
A little-known condition may mean risks for mothers and their babies.
June 22, 2007 — -- More pregnant women than believed may be at risk for a dangerous condition that can lead to difficult deliveries of huge babies, juvenile diabetes in the child, or severe birth defects.
This week, a large-scale study of pregnant women in nine countries showed that current guidelines for diagnosing a condition called gestational diabetes mellitus, or GDM, may be too generous, letting at-risk women fall through the cracks.
GDM -- which is essentially diabetes that occurs during pregnancy -- can lead to a whole host of problems for mother and baby. To learn more, Dr. Boyd Metzger, a professor of endocrinology at Northwestern University, led an international research team that studied more than 23,000 pregnant women around the globe from about 28 weeks until birth.
The moms to be had their blood sugar levels tested around 28 weeks of gestation. First, they had a fasting blood draw; then, they consumed sugar and had their blood drawn again after two hours. This "glucose tolerance test" is often used to confirm diabetes.
The scientists found that women with higher blood sugar levels were more likely to have very large babies and need a C-section.
In the group of moms with the lowest blood sugar, only 5 percent of the babies were in the top 10 percent in terms of size, while the 20 percent of the moms with the highest blood sugar had oversize babies.
The results were presented at the 67th Annual Meeting of the American Diabetes Association.
The study seems to hint that even women with borderline high blood sugar may be at risk for complications from GDM.
Women in the study who were found to have excessively high levels of blood sugar -- more than 105 milligrams per deciliter of blood fasting, or more than 200 after the glucose tolerance test -- were pulled from the study and treated for safety reasons.
But many of the remaining women whose sugar was on the "high side" but not high enough to keep them out of the study, experienced some of the same complications as women with GDM.
