Causes of Gestational Diabetes

Like the other types of diabetes, the exact cause of gestational diabetes is unknown. However, experts do have some clues.

Hormones

During pregnancy, the placenta, which is the organ that nourishes the growing baby, produces large amounts of various hormones. Hormones are important for the baby's growth.

However, these hormones may also block insulin's action in the mother's body, causing insulin resistance. All pregnant women have some degree of insulin resistance.

Gestational diabetes usually appears around the 24th week of pregnancy. This is when the placenta begins producing large quantities of the hormones that cause insulin resistance. The period between the 24th and 28th weeks of pregnancy is the usual time to screen for gestational diabetes.

Genetics

Because insulin resistance seems to cause gestational diabetes, it is more like type 2 diabetes than type 1 diabetes. And having gestational diabetes increases your chances of someday developing type 2 diabetes (but not of developing type 1 diabetes).

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Historical Perspective For thousands of years, doctors have recognized diabetes as a disease, but did not understand its cause. An early Egyptian medical text written around 1550 B.C., called the Ebers Papyrus, describes a condition of “passing too much urine.” The Greek physician Aretaeus, who lived in the second century A.D., gave diabetes its name, from a Greek word meaning “siphon” or “pass through.” Aretaeus observed that his patients' bodies appeared to “melt down” into urine.

People observed early on that the urine from people with diabetes was very sweet. In fact, one way to diagnose diabetes was to pour urine near an anthill. If the ants were attracted to the urine, it meant that the urine contained sugar. By the 18th century, physicians added the Latin term mellitus to diabetes, which describes its sugary taste.

In 1776, scientists discovered that the glucose was in the blood of both people with diabetes and people without diabetes. That led them to suspect that people with diabetes pass glucose from the blood to the urine. But they didn't know how.

Then in 1889-more than 100 years after glucose was found in blood-two German physiologists, Oskar Minkowski and Joseph von Mering, found quite by accident that the pancreas was involved in diabetes. While studying how fat is metabolized in the body, they decided to remove the pancreas from a laboratory dog.

Much to their astonishment, the dog urinated again and again.

Proving that science rewards a prepared mind, the scientists had the foresight to test the dog's urine for glucose. Sure enough, the dog had developed diabetes when its pancreas was removed.