Gestational Diabetes: How Does This Diagnosis Affect My Pregnancy?

Any pregnancy is filled with tests to continually monitor the health and well-being of both mother and child. Just one of the tests that an expecting mother can anticipate normally occurs around 24 weeks gestation; it is a fasting glucose test. A fairly simple test, the mother fasts for a pre-determined amount of time, and has blood drawn to check blood sugar levels. If this test shows any indication of a problem, a glucose tolerance test is ordered. This is a more involved test in which the mother drinks a sugary drink, and then has blood drawn at 1 hour intervals for 3 hours. The glucose tolerance test better shows how a woman's body handles high amounts of sugar ingestion; if the blood sugar levels at any given blood draw are too high, the diagnosis of gestational diabetes is made.

Let me back up- what exactly IS gestational diabetes? Babycenter's article entitled Gestational Diabetes helps to explain the condition. When food is eaten, our bodies break it down into simple sugars, the most basic being glucose. The pancreas releases a hormone called insulin which basically transports the glucose into the body's cells, where the glucose converted into energy. During gestational diabetes, the body cannot get the glucose into the cells, so levels build up in the bloodstream instead. This is the same thing that happens in Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes, but gestational diabetes refers only to diabetes that occurs or is diagnosed during pregnancy.