Question: Would the diabetes be type one or two? So are genetics involved?

Kate Timms answered on 6 Jun 2019:

The diabetes that I study in pregnancy is something called gestational diabetes. It develops for the first time when a woman is pregnant and usually goes away again after she has the baby.

Gestational diabetes is quite similar to type 2 diabetes, but not exactly. Women with gestational diabetes are more likely to develop type 2 diabetes in later life, so the theory is that women who get gestational diabetes already have a problem with their blood glucose (sugar) and insulin, but that the problem isn’t bad enough yet that we diagnose them as being diabetic.

Pregnancy is a bit like a stress test. Women’s metabolisms are changed when they are pregnant to help make sure enough nutrients like glucose are available for the growing baby. Usually, we produce insulin to lower the amount of glucose in our blood. However, because a baby needs glucose to grow in the womb, women’s bodies don’t react to insulin normally in pregnancy. They are ‘resistant’ to it, meaning that they make as much insulin but their cells don’t respond very well to it. So if a woman is already on her way to developing diabetes in later life, the metabolic challenge of pregnancy can temporarily bring on being diabetic.

It could be that genetics is involved but we don’t know that yet. Probably, some people are more at risk of developing type 2 or gestational diabetes because of their genes. We still have so much to learn!

I’m looking into how a baby’s mother having gestational diabetes results in that baby having an increased risk of developing heart disease and diabetes themselves.

I hope that answers your question!