Two-thirds of pregnancies in women with diabetes are unplanned. How long after conception do those women realize they’re pregnant? They may be eight weeks into their pregnancy before they know it’s happened.
If they’ve had high blood sugar during those eight
Two-thirds of pregnancies in women with diabetes are unplanned. How long after conception do those women realize they’re pregnant? They may be eight weeks into their pregnancy before they know it’s happened.
If they’ve had high blood sugar during those eight weeks, the damage may already be done. Women with diabetes are three to five times more likely than non-diabetic women to have a baby with birth defects, and most of those malformations are caused by high blood sugar in the very first critical weeks when the fetal heart and brain are formed.
According to research by Dr. Mary Loeken, when a mother’s glucose levels are high, a protein called glucose transporter 2 (Glut2) is activated. It takes an excess of glucose to switch on Glut2, so in normal pregnancies Glut2 stays out of the picture. But in cases of poorly controlled blood sugar, Glut2 goes to work too early in the game and acts like a wide-open door, carrying those high levels of glucose to the embryo. The embryo is forced to soak it up like a sponge, two to three times faster than normal.
It takes a lot of oxygen for the embryo to break down all that glucose. At such an early stage, however, the embryo does not yet have its own heart or blood supply. Consequently, reports Dr. Loeken, oxygen is used up more rapidly than it can be delivered.
This creates what’s called hypoxic stress; in a sense, the fetus is suffocating. Hypoxic stress blocks the expression of a gene called Pax-3. The Pax-3 protein is necessary for formation of the spinal cord and heart because it keeps embryonic cells from dying. If Pax-3 is blocked, cells die and malformations 