Gestational diabetes is expected to impart negative effects on the health, including complications during pregnancy with a serious impact on the health of the unborn child. But now, the patients will experience a great relief as a recent study, compiled by the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research, had claimed to develop a technique that would allow the doctors to estimate a woman’s risk of developing gestational diabetes up to seven years before she becomes pregnant through blood sugar testing and body weight assessments.

The findings were composed after a deep study of database with health records of around 580 women from 1984 to 1996. The researchers have examined the derived information on the parameters of blood sugar levels, blood pressure, body weight and cholesterol. Afterwards, they observed that the more cardio-metabolic risk factors a woman had the more likely she was to develop gestational diabetes if she became pregnant.

Additionally, Rhonda Bentley-Lewis, MD, of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston in collaboration with her colleagues had claimed that gestational diabetes, or pregnancy-related diabetes, may not raise the risk of heart disease independent of other cardiovascular risk factors except in certain high-risk populations, such as Hispanics.

"Physicians should closely monitor women with a history of gestational diabetes, to control their heart disease risk factors”, added Bentley-Lewis "Their risk for cardiovascular outcomes might differ by race or by factors that we didn't evaluate”.