Quote:
Originally Posted by
rachelalle 
after reading this thread I see I am not the only one with trouble passing the test. I feel like it must have alot of false positives.....\
rachelalle, I don't have the numbers in front of me for how many women get a positive on the 1 hour screen, but of those who DO get a positive on the screen, 85% of them do NOT have high readings on the 3 hour diagnostic test (according to The Birth Partner book). So yes, high rate of false positives! They've started offering a 2 hr diagnostic test in a lot of places, where you just skip the screen and do a 2 hour test with an amount of glucose in between the 1 hr screen and 3 hr test. Now I feel like I should have just done that, but my only real risk factor for GD was that I'm in my thirties, so I was hoping I would just pass the screen and not have to do any of the fasting tests.
And then I was sick, and I think that just messed it up! But we'll see. I'm really only doing the test so that if we end up in the hospital, we can say that I passed (fingers crossed) the test and they don't have to worry about the baby's blood sugar.
As spughy said, the main thing they worry about if you have GD is the baby's blood sugar level. Before birth, though, they might be more concerned about baby's growth, to make sure it's not getting too big (because we all know how accurate size estimates are!
) They would want to make sure your blood sugar levels were kept even, because that helps the baby's organs grow evenly (so if you're eating and exercising and so forth as if you have GD, that probably takes care of that).
In terms of birth, if you have GD, there might be more pressure to induce labor on the early side (38-39 weeks). Then, after the baby is born, they'll want to do several blood sugar checks on the baby (heel pricks) to make sure its levels are stable and good, because the levels can plummet after it is no longer depending on *your* system.
It seems to me that if you normally pass the diagnostic test, you might just want to do it to reduce the number of pokes and tests baby will go through after birth. But I can totally understand not wanting to do the silly glucose tests any more!
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