Female Awareness about Gestational Diabetes and its Health Risk Effect on Pregnancy Outcome among Women in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Uncontrolled gestational diabetes mellitus causes severe maternal and fetal complications such as pre-eclampsia, macrosomic baby, fetal demise, neonatal hyperbilirubinemia, and hypoglycemia and also increases obesity and type 2 DM risk in offspring later in life. This study aimed to assess awareness of women in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia regarding diabetes and its health risk effect on pregnancy outcome and to measure the prevalence of gestational DM among them. This is a comparative cross-sectional descriptive study conducted in Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Faculty of Medicine Umm Al Qura University involving 480 women living in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia during June 2021- June 2022. Data was collected through an online questionnaire formulated to survey saudi women due to covid 19 pandemics measures. About 20% had DM. Prevalence of gestational DM was 11.5% among currently pregnant participants. 76% of participants had family history of diabetes. After doing linear regression of predictors for knowledge about gestational DM, gravidity and parity became non-significant, however being in medical field, husband in medical field, having DM, past or family history of DM remained significant (p<0.001, 0.045, <0.001, 0.002 and 0.006 respectively). The highest predictor is being in medical field (β =7.218), followed by having DM (β =2.697), followed by husband in medical field (β =2.159), past history of DM (β =1.945), then family history of DM (β =1.727). Health care efforts and interventions are required to increase the awareness especially about the importance of screening for gestational DM due to the bad sequences of gestational DM.