Gestational diabetes, Low-carb diets, Needle pain
Inside Health
BBC
4.4 • 575 Ratings
🗓️ 7 July 2015
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Diabetes in pregnancy, gestational diabetes, is on the increase, and the risks to mother and baby if this condition is untreated, are very serious. Around one in fourteen pregnant women will develop GD, but the risk is much greater according to age and weight of the mother, whether there's a history of diabetes in the family and in certain ethnic groups. Dr Mark Porter visits The Rosie Maternity Hospital in Cambridge, where Dr Helen Murphy introduces him to the specialist teams that enable 70% of the women diagnosed there to manage their diabetes through diet and exercise, rather than medication. The UK's National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, NICE, has introduced new guidelines for diagnosing gestational diabetes which differ from international thresholds backed by the World Health Organisation. Mark talks to researcher Dr Claire Meek from The Rosie, one of the authors of research published in the journal Diabetologia, which found that up to 4,000 women, at risk of serious birth complications, would be missed under the new UK criteria. The teams at The Rosie are shunning the new NICE guidelines and continuing to follow the WHO thresholds. Professor Rudy Bilous, who runs the Diabetes in Pregnancy Service at the James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough and chaired the development group at NICE that produced the new diagnostic guidelines, tells Mark that he's confident that the thresholds, which were drawn up using the latest available evidence, are set at the right level.
Weight loss properties and low carbohydrate diets: listener Mark Robins from Southampton describes his success following a low carb diet (he lost nearly four stone in a year) and Inside Health's Dr Margaret McCartney and Susan Jebb, Professor of Diet and Population Health at the University of Oxford discuss the evidence behind weight loss and low carb diets.
The number of children who say they are afraid of injections is increasing and Dr Amy Baxter, a paediatric emergency doctor from Atlanta, Georgia and an expert in needle pain, has shown a link between the number of jabs and fear of needles. UK children have up to 15 vaccinations, with the new Meningitis B on the horizon, so managing that fear is important. Dr Baxter tells Mark what parents and health care professionals can do to help, and saying "Sit still, don't move, this will only hurt a bit", isn't recommended!
Producer: Fiona Hill.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, thank you for listening to this edition of Inside Health. I hope you enjoy it. |
| 0:03.6 | Coming up in today's program, cutting out the carbs to lose weight. |
| 0:08.1 | Is there something special about a low carbohydrate diet? |
| 0:11.4 | It certainly seems to have worked for this Inside Health listener. |
| 0:14.3 | I used to catch my reflection in a shop window and not be able to look because I was a size with which I was unhappy. |
| 0:21.7 | Now if I catch my reflection, I think it's my brother because he's always been slim. |
| 0:26.8 | More from the thinner Mark Robbins a little later, and I'll be talking to a pediatrician |
| 0:31.2 | about how a little thought can make childhood injections less traumatic for all concerned. |
| 0:37.2 | Words like hurt, stick, pain, sting, pinch, all the words that mean something painful to a child |
| 0:44.3 | reinforce that it's painful. It's much better to say a booster than a jab or a shot. |
| 0:49.3 | But first, gestational diabetes. That's diabetes that develops during pregnancy. It's an increasingly |
| 0:55.9 | common problem and it's an area that's attracted a fair amount of controversy recently |
| 1:00.7 | after the UK adopted guidelines on diagnosing the condition that are out of step with |
| 1:06.3 | much of the rest of the world. As a result, some experts now believe as many as one in ten affected pregnant |
| 1:12.4 | women could be slipping through the net, putting them and their babies at risk. Around one in |
| 1:18.6 | 14 pregnant women in the UK will develop gestational diabetes as the strain of the growing baby |
| 1:24.5 | overwhelms the ability of their insulin to tightly control blood sugar levels. |
| 1:29.8 | In a similar way to how being overweight can trigger the condition in the rest of us. |
| 1:34.4 | Indeed, the heavier a woman is, the more likely she is to get gestational diabetes, |
| 1:39.1 | and it's more common in older mothers and among certain ethnic groups, |
| 1:43.0 | such as Asian and African Caribbean women. |
| 1:45.8 | To find out more, I went to the busy Rosie Maternity Hospital in Cambridge. |
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