What Is Gestational Diabetes?
Reviewed by CDE Mehandi Sharma · Updated
Gestational diabetes, usually shortened to GDM, is high blood sugar that appears for the first time during pregnancy.
Glucose is sugar from your food, and it moves out of your blood into your cells with the help of a hormone called insulin. During pregnancy, the placenta produces hormones that make your body less responsive to insulin. This is normal and deliberate — it helps push glucose across to your growing baby.
In GDM, that resistance goes further than your pancreas can compensate for. It makes extra insulin to keep up, and when it cannot make enough, glucose stays high in your blood.
Two things follow from that description. First, it is a condition of pregnancy rather than a permanent one — for most people blood sugar returns to normal after delivery. Second, it is not caused by anything you did wrong.
It usually causes no symptoms at all, which is why it is found by a screening test rather than because you feel unwell.
For most people GDM is manageable with food, activity and monitoring alone. Some need insulin, and that is not a failure.
Left unmanaged, high blood sugar reaches your baby and can affect their growth and their first days after birth. That is what the monitoring is for — and with proper care, most people with GDM have healthy pregnancies and healthy babies.