09/01/2022
Always good to know your options. Thank you Encompass Birth Services for dropping some facts! 🤍🤍🤍🤍
Gestational Diabetes Testing! We’ve been offering the Fresh Test for a few months and folks are loving it! This is an alternative to the standard glucola offered for the Glucose Tolerance Test. It’s gluten free with no artificial preservatives or dyes and actually tastes really good! It tastes like lemonade 🍋
Gestational Diabetes is one of those hard things because there isn’t great consensus on ranges for diagnosing (or really even how and when to test - many opinions!). 📈
In the United States standard of care is the 50g Glucose Tolerance Test, which is actually just a screening, not a test. For the screening, you drink the 50g glucose drink and have a blood draw an hour later. Depending on which research or protocol you’re reading, the cutoff range is 130-140. We use 140 cut off for this test and so if you’re below 140, you passed! 140 is the standard of care in our area (meaning our friendly local hospital midwives also use this number). If you’re close, we might discuss some closer monitoring to ensure we’re not missing anything. 👩⚕️
If you’re over 140 (or at 140 as one of our clients just found out!), the standard is the 3-hour test. This is a fasting test which includes four blood draws and a 100g drink. We will draw a fasting number first thing in the morning, then you’ll drink the 100g drink. Then we will do repeat draws at 1 hour, 2 hours, and 3 hours. Your blood sugar should be under at least two of the reference ranges to pass. Three of our clients have had to do this test this year and all have passed! 🎊
If not, we will do more monitoring as well as nutrition and exercise correction. We will also talk about stressors and sleep, as those can also have a big impact on how your body processes sugar. 😣
Note: even if you’re not in our practice, you can buy the Fresh Test online and use it with your test! Or send us a message! Happy to help! 💞
