You’ve seen many Instagram and Facebook trends posted by mothers drinking super sweet orange liquid to gauge their body’s ability to handle glucose. Quite a number of mothers develop gestational diabetes during pregnancy. Therefore, your gynaecologist should have prepped that you to do these tests during week 26 to week 28 of pregnancy. But, if you are someone who has a high risk of diabetes, your doctor may consider testing your blood sugar as early as your first prenatal visit.
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So What is Gestational Diabetes Test?
Gestational diabetes test is a glucose screening test during pregnancy that checks your blood glucose level. Gestational diabetes develops during pregnancy and affects how your cells use glucose, which causes high blood sugar that can affect your pregnancy and your baby’s health. However, not to worry! This type of diabetes is usually temporary and will go away after your pregnancy.
Why Do You Need To Test For It?
Everyone has different hormone levels and certain hormones increase during pregnancy. Some transfer valuable nutrients from the mother to the baby so that the fetus develops and grows, but others block the action of insulin to ensure the mother does not develop low blood sugar. Gestational diabetes happens when a mother insulin levels cannot increase sufficiently. This results in rising blood sugar levels.
How Does Gestational Diabetes Affect Your Baby?
If you have gestational diabetes, you are putting your baby at risk of being excessively overweight. Extra glucose in your bloodstream can also cause high blood pressure during pregnancy and low blood sugar in the baby after delivery. Even so, it can increase the chances of needing cesarean section during delivery. As for the child, risks of obesity and developing type 2 diabetes, later on in life is higher.
What Kind Of Tests Can You Do?
There are two ways of getting it done!
The Oral Glucose Tolerance Test
During this test, you will drink glucola, a sugary beverage containing 50g of glucose. Your doctor will draw your blood one hour later to see how efficiently your body processes the glucose. If your blood glucose from the first step is too high, you will have to proceed to the other test.
The Three-Hour Glucose Tolerance Test
During this test, you will have to fast for almost 14 hours. In fact, the test is similar to the oral glucose tolerance test. Blood will be drawn before you consume the glucola that contains 100g of glucose. Blood is drawn again after one hour, two hours and three hours.
So if you have not gone for gestational diabetes test between week 24 to week 26, you should go now! These are tests that you should not ignore!
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