Obese women who are just above average for weight and blood sugar are at a higher risk of bad pregnancy outcomes than previously known, a new study has claimed.
In fact, this group is at higher risk than pregnant women who are obese with normal blood sugar or pregnant women who have gestational diabetes and a normal weight.
Till now, pregnant women who are overweight with moderately elevated blood sugar never set off any alarms for their physicians. The big concern was for women who were obese or who had gestational diabetes because those conditions are known to cause a host of health risks to the mom and baby.
"These are women who have not been on our radar because they don't have gestational diabetes and aren't obese, but our study shows if you are one step away from each of those, you carry some significant risks," Boyd Metzger, principle investigator from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said.
"We need to address the combination of overweight and blood sugar of these women as urgently as we do for women who are obese or have gestational diabetes," he said.
This group of women comprised about 6 percent of the total number of women in the study. Obese women made up 16 percent of the group and those with gestational diabetes accounted for 13.7 percent.
The study also found women who are both obese and have gestational diabetes are at a much higher risk of having an adverse pregnancy than women having only one of those conditions.
The study has been published in Diabetes Care.