Gestational diabetes is the name for diabetes that develops during pregnancy. Diabetes can develop temporarily when hormones secret­ed during pregnancy increase your body's resistance to insulin. This happens in about 2 percent to 5 percent of pregnant women.

Gestational diabetes typically develops during the second half of pregnancy - especially in the third trimester - and usually goes away after the baby is born. But more than half of all women who experience gestational diabetes develop type 2 diabetes later in life.

Most pregnant women are screened for gestational diabetes to catch the condition early, in case it occurs. If you develop gestational diabetes, being aware of your condition and controlling your blood sugar level throughout the remainder of your pregnancy can reduce complications to you and your baby.

Effects of Gestational Diabetes to the Baby:

Gestational diabetes is suffered by mothers in their late pregnancies when the baby’s body has been formed and is busy growing. This is the reason that gestational diabetes does not cause birth defects as seen in babies whose mothers had diabetes before pregnancy.

This does not mean that gestational diabetes can be ignored. In fact, poorly controlled or untreated gestational diabetes can hurt your baby by enforcing the baby’s pancreas to produce more insulin as to get rid of the excessive sugar reaching the baby due to mother’s gestational diabetes. Since baby’s body is busy growing and developing, which already require quite energy, producing more insulin by the baby’s pancreas will be hard on the baby resulting in a fat baby at the time of birth.