Gestational diabetes (GDM) is diabetes that occurs during pregnancy. Diabetes happens when the body isn’t able to control the amount of glucose (sugar) in the blood.
A hormone called Insulin controls glucose levels in the blood. Extra hormones and weight in pregnancy can make it harder for your body’s insulin to move glucose out of your blood and into your cells and muscles where it can be used as energy. In GDM, too much glucose stays in your blood. Because baby gets their nutrition from your bloodstream, they will also get this extra glucose. This can lead to bigger babies, complications in labour, and problems with baby’s blood glucose levels after they are born. If you are diagnosed with GDM you will need to test your blood glucose regularly and try to keep it within a certain range. You may need to change your diet, and might need medication to help keep your blood glucose levels stable. You will be looked after in a Pregnancy Diabetes Clinic and will have extra appointments and scans to check baby’s growth.
If you have risk factors for GDM, you will have a Glucose Tolerance Test at around 28 weeks gestation. If your blood glucose is higher than expected at the start or end of the test you will be diagnosed with GDM. Your Midwife can tell you if you will need a test.
Risk factors:
If you have had gestational diabetes previously, you will probably be asked to do some blood glucose monitoring early in your pregnancy.
If you have had bariatric (weight loss) surgery, you should not have a glucose tolerance test and should ask your midwife about fingerprick blood glucose testing instead.
It is not uncommon for someone with none of these risk factors to develop GDM. Equally, people with several risk factor may not develop GDM. If you are worried or confused about your diagnosis please speak to your antenatal team.
Unfortunately there is no surefire way to prevent GDM. Having a nutritious diet and being as active as possible may reduce your risk of developing GDM. If you do develop GDM please remember it is not your fault; it can feel very overwhelming to be given a diagnosis of GDM, but the antenatal team are here to support you and can answer any questions you have.
Tommy’s Charity has some useful information about Gestational Diabetes if you would like to find out more: Gestational Diabetes in Pregnancy (tommys.org)
Your choices will be saved as a non-identifying cookie. This means that each time you load a webpage from this website, your chosen accessibility options will be applied. These cookies will last for 28 days before resetting.
When text to speech is active, you can click the play button to hear the whole sites content read aloud. You can also highlight a section of text and press play, to hear only the highlighted text.
Choose a language from the Google provided selector below.
A screen mask is a reading tool which follows your cursor. It allows you to remove distractions from around the page and gives a clear area of focus.
Use these icons to increase, decrease or reset the size of the text throughout the site.
Change the colour of text and the background of the site with the selectors below. This removes images and makes the content across the site easier to read.