Determining the rate of postpartum follow-up visits for women diagnosed with gestational diabetes within 5 years, screening them for diabetes, and investigating possible risk factors

AIM Type 2 DM is an important complication of GDM in the long term. Guidelines recommend postpartum screening between 8th-12th PP. However, this recommendation is underrated globally. The risk factors for this progression might be history of GDM, obesity before pregnancy, overweight during and after pregnancy, family history of DM or GDM, insulin therapy, GHT, PCOS, lactating for less than 6 months. We aimed to investigate the level of awareness for the screening among women who was diagnosed as GDM, to make screenings to compare those who attended screening and those did not and to study risk factors. MATERIAL AND METHOD We calculated the ratios of those who made their postpartum screenings, their progression to type 2 DM among 144 participants who were diagnosed as GDM in our outpatient clinics of Endocrinology Department between the years 2018-2023. We also compared the 2 groups (those who went for screening and those not) in terms of the result and also investigated the effects of some risk factors. RESULTS According to results, out of 144 participants 54% already attended to postpartum diyabetes screening as recommended by guidelines. 28.2% of this group were diagnosed as pre-diabetes and 17.9% were diagnosed type 2 DM. On the other hand, among people who never attended any screening in the 5 years postpartum (46% of total), 50.0% were prediabetes and 9.1% were type 2 DM. There is a significant relation between the screening situation and the outcome. The risk factors that affect the outcome were detected as obesity before pregnancy, need for insulin therapy, having PCOS and family history of DM. CONCLUSION In this study we demonstrated that those who were diagnosed as having GDM should undergo a screening test against type 2 diabetes between 6th-8th weeks. Furthermore; the importance of weight management, particularly before pregnancy, against the development of postpartum type 2 DM is also well understood. Keywords: gestational diyabetes mellitus, long term complication, type 2 diabetes