A Few Statistics Of Gestational Diabetes
In various studied populations, there is a 3-10% variation in all of the pregnancies. There are 135,000 pregnancies that are suffering from gestational diabetes and approximately one in 2,014 women in the USA suffers from this disease.
There are many reasons which account for the rising statistics pertaining to gestational diabetes. The information on gestational diabetes states that age and obesity are considered to be two main important risk factors for the development of this disease. Moreover, those women who have their babies later in life (over the age of 35) are usually overweight and hence get themselves prone to developing this disease.
There is a mean of around 6% in the national statistics for gestational diabetes. This means that the United States is currently burdened with this disease in about 5 to 6% of all the pregnancies. Moreover, the recent information indicates that this amount is currently on the rise.
Many women today are seen to be really busy in their lives; as a result of this, they do not consume the right amounts/quality of food and most of their food consists of fast food items. They are also seen to consume increased amounts of frozen foods, which contain sodium; and a combination of fast foods (containing excess amounts of fats and sugars) and frozen foods (containing sodium) lead to excessive weight gain, while they are already in a phase of physiological weight gain during their pregnancy.
This is the reason why informative statistics on gestational diabetes has suggested that women who keep a good weight control and have the right quality of diet during their pregnancy have fewer chances to develop gestational diabetes.
The National Diabetes Fact Sheet of 2007 also states that there is a huge economic burden of Gestational diabetes and it accounts for approximately $623 million only at the time when diabetes is diagnosed. Moreover, according to certain information it is stated that there is an increased risk for older women to develop a specific type of gestational diabetes, which is known as A2 diabetes. This condition is also known to be related to genetics and whether or not, the woman developed gestational diabetes in her previous pregnancy or not.
Certain studies also state the relation of gestational diabetes with foetal complications. Gestational Diabetes imposes two main risks on the baby in forms of growth abnormalities and chemical imbalances. Because of these two reasons, the babies have to be admitted in neonatal intensive care units.
Statistically, it has been proven that children that are born to gestational diabetic mother may be small or large for their age. Large babies (macrosomic babies) have increased risk of getting delivered by instruments, which may increase the chances of development of shoulder dystocia.
Another case control study was done, which proves that gestational diabetes was associated with many birth defects and it was associated mainly with women who had a high BMI (≥ 25 kg/m²). All these facts summarize that gestational diabetes has been statistically proven to be a worldwide problem for females.
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