Women with gestational diabetes have fetuses that can adapt to the maternal diabetic metabolic environment. After birth, these adaptations may impair the usual neonatal metabolic transition from placental to lactational nutrition, leaving the newborn infant at risk of complications including low blood glucose concentrations. Although low blood glucose concentrations both cause and potentiate neonatal brain injury, there is uncertainty over “how low is too low?”, and whether some of the poor long-term outcomes reported in infants born after diabetes in pregnancy are due to neonatal hypoglycaemia directly, or result from fetal brain development in a diabetic metabolic environment.
This talk will summarise the neonatal care section of the new ADIPS Gestational Diabetes Mellitus management consensus guideline, how it links to research on neonatal outcomes after diabetes in pregnancy, and where the knowledge gaps remain for this cohort of infants.