Call to action for a life course approach

Abstract

Gestational diabetes remains the most common medical disorder in pregnancy, with short-term and long-term consequences for mothers and offspring. New insights into pathophysiology and management suggest that the current gestational diabetes treatment approach should expand from a focus on late gestational diabetes to a personalised, integrated life course approach from preconception to postpartum and beyond. Early pregnancy lifestyle intervention could prevent late gestational diabetes. Early gestational diabetes diagnosis and treatment has been shown to be beneficial, especially when identified before 14 weeks of gestation. Early gestational diabetes screening now requires strategies for integration into routine antenatal care, alongside efforts to reduce variation in gestational diabetes care, across settings that differ between, and within, countries. Following gestational diabetes, an oral glucose tolerance test should be performed 6-12 weeks postpartum to assess the glycaemic state. Subsequent regular screening for both dysglycaemia and cardiometabolic disease is recommended, which can be incorporated alongside other family health activities. Diabetes prevention programmes for women with previous gestational diabetes might be enhanced using shared decision making and precision medicine. At all stages in this life course approach, across both high-resource and low-resource settings, a more systematic process for identifying and overcoming barriers to preventative care and treatment is needed to reduce the current global burden of gestational diabetes.