A new study shows that even when mamas don’t have high enough blood sugar levels to develop prenatal diabetes, their babies may still be at risk for problems.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently helped to fund this study which showed that babies of mamas with high blood sugar levels and mamas with just higher than normal blood sugar levels are at risk for the same issues. These issues include a greater likelihood for caesarean birth, an abnormally large body size at birth, and shoulder dystocia.
The problem is that although researchers know high blood sugar levels aren’t good, they can’t yet state how high is high. It used to be thought that only mamas with very high blood sugar levels put their babies at risk, but now we can see that even somewhat high blood sugar may be bad.
Until research can show how high is a bad high when it comes to blood sugar, you can at least know the risk factors for higher than normal blood sugar - being overweight, being an older mama, and having high blood pressure are risks.
