What is Gestational Diabetes

What is gestational diabetes? I’m pretty sure you’re at the moment pregnant or someone closed to you is pregnant, because gestational diabetes happened only in pregnant women. It is occurred in pregnant women who have never had diabetes before but have significant high blood glucose levels during pregnancy. Gestational diabetes is estimated to affect about 18% of pregnancies.

What causes gestational diabetes? Before answering that question, let's learn how high blood sugar levels may occur. Our body needs sugar to produce energy. Sugar is coming to our body from foods (carbohydrates). Sugar (glucose) is absorbed from blood stream by the cells to create energy. If the process of sugar's absorption is interrupted, the blood sugar levels will increase. In this part, Insulin is the main role. It manages the process of sugar's absorption by the body’s cells.

In pregnancy, the placenta supports the baby while growing in the uterus. Placenta also produces hormones to help baby's development process. Somehow, these hormones blocks the action of mother's insulin and causing a problem called insulin resistance. This condition makes mother's difficult to use insulin. Without enough insulin, glucose can not leave the blood to be transformed into energy. Hence, blood sugar levels of pregnant women will rise.

What are the symptoms of gestational diabetes? Usually, pregnant women will have no symptoms if the have gestational diabetes. They found out that they have diabetes during routine pregnancy check up. Although they're very rarely, especially if the diabetes is poorly uncontrolled, you may notice these symptoms:

- Feeling more thirsty

- Feeling more hungry

- Feeling more exhausted

- Frequent urination

Does gestational diabetes affect the baby? Untreated gestational diabetes may hurt your baby in the following way. Although pancreas has done its job to produce insulin, it does not lower your blood sugar levels (because of the hormonal blockage mentioned above). So, extra blood glucose will cross through placenta and giving the baby high blood sugar levels too.

Increasing levels of blood glucose in your baby is causing their pancreas work harder to produce more insulin. Moreover, since they get more than enough energy than they require to grow and develop, the extra glucose is then stored as fat. This condition can lead to "fat" baby (also known as macrosomia).

Macrosomia means really big baby syndrome or gigantism, because the weight of macrosomia baby is more than 9-10 pounds or more than 90% higher weight than normal newborns. But, having giant baby is not only the matter of inability to use cute little outfit for newborns. So, what's wrong with a big newborn?

1. Macrosomia causes a higher risk of death of the fetus in the late stages of pregnancy (also known as stillbirth).

2. Increasing risk of obesity when they grow up.

3. There's a high risk for a scary condition during childbirth called shoulder systocia. The baby's head emerges but the shoulder gets stuck. In this situation, both mother and baby's are in a serious harm.

4. A heavyweight fetus can cause backbreaking experience in the last weeks of pregnancy.

5. Mom may require cesarean section because of the very large baby. Or the can also experience birth canal injuries.

6. Mom is in a risk for hemorrhaging and need blood transfusion.