Find Out What Causes Gestational Diabetes

There are many women who ask what causes gestational diabetes and before answering, they should know what the condition really refers to.

Gestational diabetes is a type of condition that affects pregnant women. In fact 2%-10% of pregnant women have this kind of condition.

Information on gestational diabetes causes

This is considered to be the most common pregnancy complication. In a nutshell diabetes is a condition that causes high blood sugar levels. The food that you eat is broken down in the stomach into glucose. This enters the bloodstream and with the help of insulin it is used by the cells as fuel.

What Causes Gestational DiabetesNonetheless regarding the gestational diabetes causes you should know that if there isn’t enough insulin, the glucose isn’t used by the cells and so too much of it remains in the blood and it doesn’t get converted into energy.

During pregnancy, the hormones can make the cell less responsive to insulin.

Usually when asking what causes gestational diabetes there is no real answer because, if it is needed, the pancreas simply produces more of it.

However if the pancreas can’t produce enough insulin, the blood sugar levels remain too high and this is when gestational diabetes appears.

The good news regarding gestational diabetes is that usually women get rid of the condition when the baby is born. Nonetheless if you had gestational diabetes you have higher chances of being affected again during another pregnancy and you could also have diabetes at a later stage.

Causes

In case you are asking what causes gestational diabetes you should know that there are some factors that increase the chances of being affected. You are at a higher risk if you are obese with a BMI over 30, you had gestational diabetes before, you have some sugar in the urine or if you have family history of diabetes.

There are many other factors regarding gestational diabetes causes that determine doctors to test you.

These include previously having a big baby, having a previous stillbirth without any obvious reason, having another baby with birth defects, high blood pressure or being over 35.

There have been some studies conducted regarding what causes gestational diabetes and they have found that there could be a link between too much weight gain in the first trimester and gestational diabetes.

The risks are even higher if the woman was overweight to start with.

The truth regarding gestational diabetes causes that there are some cases when women have been affected that didn’t have risk factors. This is why the test is routinely done between the weeks 24 and 28. Still there are some women who are said to be of very low risk and because of this they aren’t tested.

There are some exceptions from testing regarding what causes gestational diabetes and these are determined by whether the patient is under 25, if she has a normal weight and if she isn’t a member of an ethnic group that is more prone to the condition, such as Hispanic, Australian or African.

You don’t really have to worry about the gestational diabetes causes if you don’t have a family history of diabetes, you didn’t have high results on a blood sugar test and you never had a large baby or complications during a pervious pregnancy that could be associated with gestational diabetes.

As you can see there is no definite answer to the question what causes gestational diabetes. Sometimes it appears randomly, while in other cases there are some risk factors that make it appear. In fact you can never know in advance whether you will be affected or not.

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