Diabetes Information and Treatment Guide

Gestational diabetes (GD) simply means elevated blood sugar during pregnancy. To understand it, you must first understand the normal changes in pregnancy metabolism (34). When you are pregnant, certain hormones make your insulin less effective at transporting glucose, the body’s fuel, out of your bloodstream into your cells. This increases the amount of circulating glucose, making it available to your baby for growth and development. This “insulin resistance” increases as pregnancy advances. As a result, your blood glucose levels after eating rise linearly throughout pregnancy. By the third trimester, you will tend to have higher blood glucose levels after eating than nonpregnant women (hyperglycemia), despite secreting normal and above normal amounts of insulin. During overnight sleep, the excess insulin has a chance to mop up, which causes morning glucose levels to be lower on average than in nonpregnant women (hypoglycemia). (more…)

Diabetes is currently an incurable condition in which too much glucose (sugar) is present in the blood. Find out more about the different types and how it’s treated. (more…)