Despite the reassurances from the doctor and nurses it is still frightening to think there may be a problem with your health, and particularly how it may impact your baby’s health. You can’t believe that you are in that small group of 15% to 20% of pregnant women that need to have a gestational diabetes test.

You have so many questions. You thought you ate the proper diet, what made you at risk for the disease and what signs of gestational diabetes did you miss? This article will explore these questions and help you understand what is involved in the test procedure.

Let’s skip your diet for the time being. We will address that in a later article. The big nagging question that keeps you up at night is…

What signs or problems did the doctor notice to want me to get a gestational diabetes test? What did the doctor or nurses not tell me?

In all probability he/she saw nothing and most certainly if they did see something to alarm them they would have told you. There are some common risk factors that usually warrant this simple and harmless test.

These include:

1. Were you overweight before you became pregnant? You may have already had pre-diabetes which has no symptoms.

2. Are you over the age of 30? Many women are waiting longer to have families and health risk does increase the older we become.

3. Have you delivered other children where one or more weighed more than nine pounds at birth?

4. Have you ever previously had a stillborn child or perhaps a miscarriage?

5. Are there any relatives in your immediate family who have diabetes or been diagnosed with pre-diabetes?

6. Has your doctor mentioned that he/she thinks you have gained more weight than your doctor recommended or believes is normal?

All of these factors are risk factors that can lead to you developing a disease that is unique only to pregnancy. This disease is known as gestational diabetes. Doctors are vigilant about testing for it if you have any risk factors because of the harm it can do to your unborn child.

Don’t put off this important test!

You and your child’s health could depend on it.

The actual testing for the disease in quite simple, but the drawn out process to get the final test results are agonizing and can be nerve raking. Your doctor may request a glucose screening be completed if you have any of these risk factors or if he/she has any other reason to suspect that you may have a problem with gestational diabetes during you pregnancy.

Most doctor offices will send you to a lab for the testing, and it is all done in an outpatient environment. The glucose test is typically done in the third trimester anywhere between the 24th to the 28th week of your pregnancy.

This test is very simple and done in 4-easy steps:

1. You begin the test by having the nurse draw a small blood sample from your arm.
2. Next you will drink a solution that is made up of flavored sugar added to water.
3. After drinking this rather sweet drink you will need to wait for about an hour without eating anything or having another drink.
4. The lab’s nurse or technician will call you back after the one hour is up so they can take another small blood sample from your arm.

The hardest part is not the blood draws, though no one likes needles! The hardest part is step 3 where you have to sit around and wait for an hour without being able to snack or drink anything. Bring a good book unless you like to read those outdated magazines while you are waiting.

The reason for making you wait an hour before drawing blood again is to give the sugar solution time to make its way into your bloodstream so that the test can be accurate.

Now for the agonizing and nerve raking part of the gestational diabetes test, It will take up to three days for the test results to come back to the doctor.

As you can see the process of testing is only a small inconvenience and the probability that you will be fine are in your favor. Only a small number of women (around 2% to 7%) develop gestational diabetes.

If you want to read more about the gestational diabetes test and diabetes during pregnancy, click over to Jill and Samuel Wyse’s informational site on diabetes at http://www.diabetes-resourceguide.com - While there, make sure to get your free report on “How to Control Your Diabetes.”

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Samuel_Wyse

This entry was posted on Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 11:55 am and is filed under Diabetes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.