Influence of pregnancy on the 75-g OGTT. A prospective multicenter study. The Diabetic Pregnancy Study Group of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes.

This study reports the responses to a 75-g oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) in 1009 pregnant women from throughout Europe. We reached the following conclusions. 1) A pregnant woman tends to have blood glucose concentrations that are elevated for a longer period of time after an oral glucose load. Therefore, approximately 10% of women will reach or exceed 8 mM glucose at 2 h, but it is unlikely that 10% of European women have disordered carbohydrate metabolism. 2) The fasting and 1-h values should be included in any analysis of the response of the patient. By doing this, many fewer women will have responses regarded as abnormal; in this series, it reduced the 79 women with a 2-h value greater than 8 mM to 15 who were considered to have carbohydrate intolerance (2 with diabetes, 13 with impaired glucose tolerance [IGT]). 3) By increasing the 2-h cutoff value to greater than or equal to 9 mM, the number of women regarded as at risk would be reduced by greater than 50% (from 79 to 32 in this series), but 10 of the 13 women with two abnormal values would still have been detected, as would the 2 diabetic women. 4) From the obstetric viewpoint, mothers who screen positive do not have bigger babies, they deliver close to term, and they do not have particular stigmas such as a family history of diabetes or an increased tendency to smoke or to have an adverse obstetric outcome. However, they do tend to be older and heavier.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)