If the above control measures aren’t enough to manage your blood sugar levels, you can take insulin injections to lower your blood sugar level after consulting your diabetologist. Proper screening and care can easily avoid various congenital anomalies. You can also watch Healthik videos to learn about Diabetes during pregnancy, its causes, symptoms, and treatments.
A Complete Guide To Gestational Diabetes
Diabetes is a chronic health disease that badly affects your body’s efficiency of turning food into energy. When you take a meal, your body breaks it down into glucose and passes it to blood cells. When your body’s sugar level is high, your pancreas releases insulin. If your body is affected by this chronic disease, then your body will not produce enough insulin. In this condition, your bloodstream contains too much blood sugar, which can cause severe health issues over time. It can affect your heart, vision, and kidney. Mainly there are three types of Diabetes named Type 1 diabetes, Type 2 diabetes, and gestational Diabetes. If your body is affected by Type 1 diabetes, then it will not be able to make insulin. In the case of type 2 diabetes, your body does not use insulin properly and is not able to keep your blood sugar level normal. You can visit the Healthik Instagram page to get a complete guide to type 2 diabetes.
The third type of Diabetes develops in pregnant women only. This usually develops around 20 to 24 weeks of pregnancy. Even if gestational Diabetes is detected, you should not panic because it usually goes away after your baby is born. The chances of gestational Diabetes occurring is 18 percent means out of 100 pregnant women, 18 will develop Diabetes. With this type of Diabetes, the risk of type 2 diabetes in mother and child is high at a later age.
Causes:
The leading cause of Diabetes during pregnancy is not well known yet, but hormonal changes play an essential role. During the pregnancy, your body produces many hormones, including human placental lactogen, to insulin resistance hormones that affect your placenta and help uphold your pregnancy.
The production of insulin resistance hormones increases with time; this makes your body resistant to insulin. Insulin is essential in regulating blood sugar levels as it helps glucose out of your blood into cells, turning it into energy. As we already discussed, your body produces more insulin-resistant hormones during pregnancy, which means more glucose is available in your bloodstream to be passed to your baby. Due to more insulin-resistant hormones, your blood level may rise abnormally.
Diagnosis:
At twenty-four weeks of pregnancy, every woman should undergo an oral glucose tolerance test, which takes about two hours. Diabetes is detected by giving the pregnant woman a sugary drink containing 75gm of glucose and then verifying blood samples at half-hour intervals. Gestational Diabetes is confirmed if the fasting sugar is more than 90 mg or after meal sugar is more than 140 mg.
Importance of diagnosis of gestational Diabetes:
Diagnosis of gestational Diabetes is essential because the fetus is at high risk. Nothing will happen to the woman, but it affects the fetus like congenital anomalies, stillbirth, big fat baby, and Polyhdromious.
Treatment:
You can control gestational Diabetes with a healthy protein-rich diet and with some good exercise. Pregnant women having gestational Diabetes should take
- Protein-rich diet having no carbohydrates.
- Take small frequent meals at regular intervals.
- Try to avoid sugar-rich drinks and food.
- Include fruits, tofu, chicken, lentils, cheese, and fish in your diet.
- Walk regularly after consultation with your gynecologist.
- Use stairs in place of lift
- Always be active