Gestational diabetes predictable: Study
Measuring risk factors such as blood sugar levels and body weight can help doctors to identify women who are more likely to develop gestational diabetes years before pregnancy.
A 12-year follow up of 580 US women showed that the risk of developing gestational diabetes increases directly with the number of adverse risk factors associating with diabetes and heart disease such as high blood pressure, elevated blood levels of sugar and being overweight.
Scientists at the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research found that overweight women who have high blood levels of sugar at the same time are 4.6 times more likely to develop gestational diabetes than their peers who have none of these risk factors.
Gestational diabetes is a condition in which women, with no previous history of diabetes, experiences high blood levels of glucose during pregnancy. The condition, which occurs in approximately 4 percent of all pregnancies, may cause complications for the mother and her baby.
Children born to mothers with gestational diabetes are typically at an increased risk of being large for gestational age and subsequently complications, including low blood sugar and jaundice at the time of birth as well as obesity, diabetes and metabolic disease later on in life.
The new findings also showed that women with BMI values of 25 or more and a glucose blood level of 100 to 140 mg/dL are five-fold more prone to gestational diabetes.
Looking for such risk factors up to seven years before pregnancy could help physicians diagnose and prevent gestational diabetes and its side effects, researchers wrote in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology.
"Our study indicates that a woman’s cardio-metabolic risk profile for factors routinely assessed at medical visits, such as blood sugar, high blood pressure, cholesterol and body weight, can help clinicians identify high-risk women to target for primary prevention or early management of [gestational diabetes]," said lead author Monique Hedderson.
"Clinicians should be aware that patients with an increasing number of cardiometabolic risk factors ... before pregnancy may be at particularly high risk of the development of gestational diabetes and might benefit from early screening or dietary and exercise interventions to prevent the development of gestational diabetes," the researchers concluded.
Source: presstv.ir
